The CRU graph. Note that it
is calibrated in tenths of a degree Celsius and that even that tiny
amount of warming started long before the late 20th century. The
horizontal line is totally arbitrary, just a visual trick. The whole
graph would be a horizontal line if it were calibrated in whole degrees
-- thus showing ZERO warming

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in
many people that causes them to delight in going without material
comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people --
with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many
Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct
too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they
have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an
ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us
all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The blogspot version of this blog is HERE. The Blogroll. My Home Page. Email John Ray here. Other mirror sites: Dissecting Leftism. For a list of backups viewable at times when the main blog is "down", see here. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing) See here or here for the archives of this site
****************************************************************************************

31 March, 2014

Climate change could make humans extinct, warns health expert

And
pigs might fly. The IPCC has just released its latest round of
prognostications so floods of fears are breaking out worldwide at the
moment. The article below is one example of that.

The very
first sentence is a lie. The earth is not warming at all and has
not done so for 17 years. What the author has done is look at one
of the IPCC "Scenarios" and take it as fact. And the one she has
lifted is one of the more extreme scenarios. A 2 degree
temperature rise is the one most predicted by Warmists but she has
picked a 4 degree rise.

Everything she says is true -- but only
if global warming is occurring -- and she offers only assertions
about that. The next article below gives you the actual
figures. I won't comment on the lady's health science. It is
as bad as her atmospheric science

The Earth is warming so
rapidly that unless humans can arrest the trend, we risk becoming
"extinct" as a species, a leading Australian health academic has warned.

Helen
Berry, associate dean in the faculty of health at the University of
Canberra, said while the Earth has been warmer and colder at different
points in the planet's history, the rate of change has never been as
fast as it is today.

"What is remarkable, and alarming, is the
speed of the change since the 1970s, when we started burning a lot of
fossil fuels in a massive way," she said. "We can't possibly evolve to
match this rate [of warming] and, unless we get control of it, it will
mean our extinction eventually."

Professor Berry is one of three
leading academics who have contributed to the health chapter of a
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report due on Monday.
She and co-authors Tony McMichael, of the Australian National
University, and Colin Butler, of the University of Canberra, have
outlined the health risks of rapid global warming in a companion piece
for The Conversation, also published on Monday. The three warn that the
adverse effects on population health and social stability have been
"missing from the discussion" on climate change.

"Human-driven
climate change poses a great threat, unprecedented in type and scale, to
wellbeing, health and perhaps even to human survival," they write.

They
predict that the greatest challenges will come from undernutrition and
impaired child development from reduced food yields; hospitalisations
and deaths due to intense heatwaves, fires and other weather-related
disasters; and the spread of infectious diseases.

They warn the
"largest impacts" will be on poorer and vulnerable populations, winding
back recent hard-won gains of social development programs.

Projecting
to an average global warming of 4 degrees by 2100, they say "people
won't be able to cope, let alone work productively, in the hottest parts
of the year".

They say that action on climate change would
produce "extremely large health benefits", which would greatly outweigh
the costs of curbing emission growth.

A leaked draft of the IPCC
report notes that a warming climate would lead to fewer cold
weather-related deaths but the benefits would be "greatly" outweighed by
the impacts of more frequent heat extremes. Under a high emissions
scenario, some land regions will experience temperatures four to seven
degrees higher than pre-industrial times, the report said.

While
some adaptive measures are possible, limits to humans' ability to
regulate heat will affect health and potentially cut global productivity
in the warmest months by 40 per cent by 2100.

Fig.3.
The upper panel shows the air temperature at the summit of the
Greenland Ice Sheet, reconstructed by Alley (2000) from GISP2 ice core
data. The time scale shows years before modern time. The rapid
temperature rise to the left indicate the final part of the even more
pronounced temperature increase following the last ice age. The
temperature scale at the right hand side of the upper panel suggests a
very approximate comparison with the global average temperature (see
comment below). The GISP2 record ends around 1854, and the two graphs
therefore ends here. There has since been an temperature increase to
about the same level as during the Medieval Warm Period and to about 395
ppm for CO2. The small reddish bar in the lower right indicate the
extension of the longest global temperature record (since 1850), based
on meteorological observations (HadCRUT3). The lower panel shows the
past atmospheric CO2 content, as found from the EPICA Dome C Ice Core in
the Antarctic (Monnin et al. 2004). The Dome C atmospheric CO2 record
ends in the year 1777.

The diagram above (Fig.3) shows the
major part of the present interglacial period, the Holocene, as seen
from the summit of the Greenland Ice cap. The approximate positions of
some warm historical periods are shown by the green bars, with
intervening cold periods.

Clearly Central Greenland temperature
changes are not identical to global temperature changes. However, they
do tend to reflect global temperature changes with a decadal-scale delay
(Box et al. 2009), with the notable exception of the Antarctic region
and adjoining parts of the Southern Hemisphere, which is more or less in
opposite phase (Chylek et al. 2010) for variations shorter than ice-age
cycles (Alley 2003). This is the background for the very approximate
global temperature scale at the right hand side of the upper panel.
Please also note that the temperature record ends in 1854 AD, and for
that reason is not showing the post Little Ice Age temperature increase.
In the younger part of the GISP2 temperature reconstruction the time
resolution is around 10 years. Any comparison with measured temperatures
should therefore be made done using averages over periods of similar
lengths.

During especially the last 4000 years the Greenland
record is dominated by a trend towards gradually lower temperatures,
presumably indicating the early stages of the coming ice age (Fig.3). In
addition to this overall temperature decline, the development has also
been characterised by a number of temperature peaks, with about 950-1000
year intervals. It may even be speculated if the present warm period
fits into this overall scheme of natural variations?

The past
temperature changes show little (if any) relation to the past
atmospheric CO2 content as shown in the lower panel of figure 3.
Initially, until around 7000 yr before now, temperatures generally
increase, even though the amount of atmospheric CO2 decreases. For the
last 7000 years the temperature generally has been decreasing, even
though the CO2 record now display an increasing trend. Neither is any of
the marked 950-1000 year periodic temperature peaks associated with a
corresponding CO2 increase. The general concentration of CO2 is low,
wherefore the theoretical temperature response to changes in CO2 should
be more pronounced than at higher concentrations, as the CO2 forcing on
temperature is decreasing logarithmic with concentration. Nevertheless,
no net effect of CO2 on temperature can be identified from the above
diagram, and it is therefore obvious that significant climatic changes
can occur without being controlled by atmospheric CO2. Other phenomena
than atmospheric CO2 must have had the main control on global
temperature for the last 11,000 years.

Can
I say that I view this diagram as the single most deadly illustration
available with which to nail the DAGW coffin tightly shut.

The
two messages it contains are (i) that 20th century warming falls
completely within a well established natural rhythmn of warming and
cooling (the 1500 year cycle that Fred has written a book on); and (ii)
that over the late Holocene, as carbon dioxide levels rose gently the
long-term temperature signature declined.

Each of these arguments
is fatal to the simple DAGW hypothesis, which is why you will very
rarely find IPCColytes referring to this graph.

For some reason
there has been a recent outbreak of comments about modern temperatures
being warmer than those of the MWP. A third use for this graph is to
show the irrelevance of that assertion (even were it to be true, which
it is probably not) - the real comparison should be with the early
Holocene Climatic Optimum which was obviously significantly warmer than
today for an extended period. On top of which, earlier interglacial
climatic optima are known from Antarctic ice cores to have been up to 5
degrees warmer than today.

The sole caveat to all this is that
these records represent regional high latitude and not global
temperatures. And so they do. But, that said, many other palaeoclimatic
records from all latitudes show similar patterning.

More Fraudulent Science From EPA

Paul Driessen

The
Obama Environmental Protection Agency recently slashed the maximum
allowable sulfur content in gasoline from 30 parts per million to 10
ppm. The agency claims its new “Tier 3” rule will bring $7 billion to
$19 billion in annual health benefits by 2030. “These standards are a
win for public health, a win for our environment and a win for our
pocketbooks,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy insists.

It’s all
hokum. Like almost everything else emanating from EPA these days, the
gasoline regulations are a case study in how America’s economy, jobs,
living standards, health and welfare are being pummeled by secretive,
deceptive, and indeed fraudulent and corrupt government practices.

Since
the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, America’s cars have eliminated
some 99% of pollutants that once came out of tailpipes, notes air
quality expert Joel Schwartz. Since 2004, under Tier 2 rules, refiners
have reduced sulfur in gasoline from an average of 300 ppm to 30 ppm – a
90% drop, on top of pre-2004 reductions. In addition, because newer
cars start out cleaner and stay cleaner throughout their lives, fleet
turnover is reducing emissions by 8 to10 percent per year, steadily
improving air quality.

The net result, says a 2012 Environ
International study, is that ground-level ozone concentrations will fall
even more dramatically by 2022. Volatile organic pollutants will
plummet by 62%, carbon monoxide by 51% and nitrous oxides by 80% –
beyond reductions already achieved between 1970 and 2004.

EPA
(which once promised to be ultra-transparent) claims its rules will add
less than a penny per gallon to gasoline prices; but it won’t say how it
arrived at that estimate. Industry sources say the Tier 3 rules will
require $10 billion in upfront capital expenditures, an additional $2.4
billion in annual compliance expenses, significant increases in refinery
energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, an extra 5-9 cents per
gallon in manufacturing costs, which will certainly hit consumers at
the pump.

But regardless of their ultimate cost, the rules will
reduce monthly ozone levels by just 1.2 parts per billion during rush
hour, says Environ. That’s equivalent to 12 cents out of $100 million or
1.2 seconds out of 32,000 years. These minuscule improvements could not
even have been measured by equipment existing a couple decades ago.
Their contribution to improved human health will be essentially zero.

Not
so, say the EPA, Sierra Club and American Lung Association (ALA). The
rules will reduce asthma in “the children,” they insist. However, asthma
incidences have been increasing, while air pollution has declined –
demonstrating that the pollution-asthma connection is a red herring. The
disease is caused by allergies, a failure to expose young children to
sufficient allergens to cause their immune systems to build resistance
to airborne allergens, and lack of sufficient exercise to keep lungs
robust. Not surprisingly, a Southern California study found no
association between asthma hospitalizations and air pollution levels.

Moreover,
EPA paid the ALA $20 million between 2001 and 2010. No wonder it echoes
agency claims about air quality and lung problems. The payments
continue today, while EPA also funnels millions to various
environmentalist pressure groups – and even to “independent” EPA
scientific review panels – that likewise rubber stamp too many EPA
pollution claims, studies and regulatory actions.

As Ron Arnold
recently reported in The Washington Examiner, 15 of EPA’s Clean Air
Scientific Advisory Committee members have received $180.8 million in
EPA grants since 2000. One CASAC panelist (Ed Avol of USC) received
$51.7 million! The seven CASAC executive committee members pocketed
$80.2 million. Imagine Big Oil paying that kind of cash to an advisory
group, and calling it “independent.” The news media, government and
environmentalists would have a field day with that one.

The Clean
Air Act, Information Quality Act, Executive Order 12866 and other laws
require that agencies assess both the costs and benefits of proposed
regulations, adopt them only if their benefits justify their costs, and
even determine whether a regulation is worth implementing at all.
However, EPA and other agencies systematically violate these rules,
routinely inflate the alleged benefits of their rules, and habitually
minimize or even ignore their energy, economic, health and social costs.

Reporting
on a hearing held by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House
Science, Space and Technology Committee, Arnold noted that CASAC members
say they weren’t even aware that they are obligated to advise EPA on
both benefits and costs. Former EPA Assistant Administrator for Air and
Radiation Jeff Holmstead testified, “As far as I know, CASAC never
fulfilled this requirement as it relates to the ozone standard or any
other” rule.

Former CASAC chairman Dr. Roger McClellan told Rep.
Smith he did not think the panel “ever advised EPA to take account of
the role of socioeconomic factors, unemployment or other risk factors”
adversely affecting people’s health. Another former CASAC member
testified that the advisory committee was not even “allowed to discuss
any of the adverse consequences” associated with new rulemakings.

EPA
regulations impose countless billions of dollars in annual impacts on
the US economy, according to studies by the Heritage Foundation,
Competitive Enterprise Institute and Government Accountability Office.
Estimates of total compliance costs for all federal regulations range to
nearly $2 trillion per year. Some may bring benefits, but many or most
also inflict significant harm on human health.

They mean millions
of layoffs, far fewer jobs created, and steadily declining quality of
life for millions of Americans, who cannot heat and cool their homes
properly, pay the rent and mortgage, or save for retirement. They mean
increased commuting to multiple jobs, poor nutrition, sleep deprivation,
higher incidences of depression and alcohol, drug, spousal and child
abuse, and lower life expectancies.

In another example, EPA
justifies its onerous carbon dioxide regulations by asserting that
Earth’s climate is highly sensitive to C02, hypothesizing every
conceivable carbon cost, and imputing huge monetized damages from
hydrocarbon use and CO2 emissions ($36/ton of CO2 emitted). It
completely ignores even the most obvious and enormous job, health and
welfare benefits of using fossil fuels; even the benefits of higher
carbon dioxide levels for food crops, forests and grasslands; and even
the harmful effects that these regulations are having on energy prices
and reliability, and thus people’s jobs, health and welfare.

The
EPA, ALA and CASAC likewise insist that new Mercury and Air Toxic
Standards for coal-fired power plants will bring huge health benefits.
However, the mercury risks were hugely overblown, the proclaimed dangers
from fine particulates were contradicted by EPA’s own illegal
experiments on human subjects – and the agency never assessed the health
and welfare damage that the MATS rules will impose by causing the loss
of 200,000 jobs and 23,000 megawatts of reliable, affordable electricity
by 2015.

Similarly, EPA and CASAC blithely failed to consider
the human carnage that will result from their new 54.5 mpg vehicle
mileage standards, as people are forced into smaller, lighter, less safe
cars. Having based numerous regulations on Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change reports that have been roundly criticized as erroneous
and even fraudulent, EPA now refuses to reconsider any of its rules,
even though there has been no warming for 17 years and the IPCC itself
is back-peddling on previous claims.

Ignoring all these facts,
the nation’s automakers nevertheless supported EPA’s Tier 3 sulfur
rules. They prefer to have a single national standard, instead of one
for California and one for the other 49 states. But to “Californiacate”
America’s regulatory system is exactly the wrong direction to go. The
once-Golden State has among the most perverse taxes and regulations –
and thus some of the highest unemployment rates, especially for blacks,
Hispanics and inland communities. Instead of emulating its strangulation
by regulation proclivities, we should be forcing it to adopt more
commonsense, scientifically sound rules.Congress, state
legislatures, attorneys general, people and courts need to exert much
greater control over now unaccountable government agencies. At the very
least, we need to ensure that legal and scientific standards are
followed, and the harmful effects of regulations are fully and honestly
analyzed, accounted for and debated, for all pending and recently
promulgated regulations, at every level of government.

Consumers
considering installing solar panels on their rooftops have far more to
think through than the initial decision to “go solar.”

They may
search for the best price, only to discover, as customers in central
Florida did, that after paying $20,000-40,000 for their systems, they
are stuck with installations that may be unusable or unsafe. BlueChip
Energy—which also operated as Advanced Solar Photonics (ASP) and
SunHouse Solar—sold its systems at environmental festivals and home
shows. Buyers thought they were getting a good deal and doing the right
thing for the environment. Instead, they were duped.

A year ago,
it was revealed that BlueChip Energy’s solar panels had counterfeit UL
labels—this means that the panels may not comply with standard safety
requirements established by the independent global certification company
Underwriters Laboratory. The Orlando Sentinel reports: “UL testing
assures that a product won't catch fire, will conduct electricity
properly and can withstand weather. Without such testing, no one is
certain if the solar panels may fail.” Additionally, it states: “Without
the safety testing, they shouldn't be connected to the electric
grid”—which leaves customers nervous about possible risks such as
overheating. Other reports claim that BlueChip inflated the efficiency
rates of its photovoltaic panels, which do not meet “65 percent of the
company’s published performance ratings.”

In July 2013,
BlueChip’s assets were sold off at pennies on the dollar and customers
were left with rooftop solar packages that now have no warranty.

With the shakeout in the solar photovoltaic industry, bankruptcy is a key concern for buyers. No company equals no warranty.

Two
of China’s biggest panel makers have failed. On March 20, 2013,
Suntech, one of the world’s biggest solar panel manufacturers, filed
bankruptcy. Earlier this month Shanghai Chaori Solar became China's
first domestic corporate bond default. The Wall Street Journal reports
that another, Baoding Tainwei, has reported a second year of losses and
investors are waiting to “see if officials will let it fail.”

Regarding
Suntech’s bankruptcy, an industry report says the following about the
warranties: “While Suntech has said that it was committed to maintaining
the warranty obligations on its products following the bankruptcy, we
are unsure if customers will be willing to take a risk considering the
firm’s faltering financials.”

Last month, it was reported that
solar panels can be “dangerous in an emergency.” Firefighters have been
forced to stop fighting a fire due to electrocution concerns. The report
quotes Northampton, MA, Fire Chief Brian Duggan as saying electrocution
is not their only concern: “cutting through the roof for ventilation
would also take a lot longer.” Springfield fire commissioner Joe Conant
says: “nothing will stop them if there’s a life to be saved, but if it’s
simply to save the structure, solar panels may keep them from going on
the roof.

A Fox News story on the risk solar panels pose to
fire-fighters states: “Two recent fires involving structures decked with
solar panels have triggered complaints from fire chiefs and calls for
new codes and regulations that reflect the dangers posed by the
clean-energy devices. A two-alarm fire last week at a home in Piedmont,
Calif., prompted Piedmont Fire Chief Warren McLaren to say the
technology ‘absolutely’ made it harder on firefighters. Weeks earlier,
in Delanco, NJ, more than 7,000 solar panels on the roof of a massive
300,000-square foot warehouse factored into Delanco Fire Chief Ron
Holt’s refusal to send his firefighters onto the roof of a Dietz &
Watson facility.”

Then, of course, there are new concerns about
scam artists like the one in North Carolina who collected “money from
victims under false pretense that he would buy and install solar panels
in their residences.”

As if all of that wasn’t enough, a new potentially fraudulent scheme has just been exposed.

A
recent report from the Arizona Republic, points to complaints the
Arizona Corporation Commission—the state’s top utility regulator—is
getting from Tucson customers of SolarCity Corporation. They claim: “the
solar leasing company is misleading them regarding the state rules for
hooking up a solar array.”

In essence, customers in Tucson are
being told one thing by their utility, Tucson Electric Power (TEP), but
something else by a private solar power company, SolarCity—the nation’s
second largest solar electrical contractor. This has drawn the ire of
Bob Stump, Chairman of the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC). “This
is an issue of consumer protection and solar installer transparency,”
Stump told the Arizona Republic.

Stump made his concerns clear in
a March 12 letter to Lyndon Rive, SolarCity’s Chief Executive Officer:
“I am concerned that you—as well as other solar providers—may be
communicating with customers in a way that is both confusing and
misleading and which deprives them of the balanced information they need
in order to make informed decisions.”

The letter states: “Some
customers … say that solar providers have told them that the rates,
rules and regulations applicable to net metering are ‘grandfathered,’
thereby implying that the rates associated with net metering are not
subject to change.” As a result, Stump says: “Customers are then
surprised, disappointed, and angry to learn from TEP that this may not
be the case.”

As a vocal advocate for responsible energy—which I
define as energy that is efficient, effective and economical—I have
closely followed what is happening with Arizona’s solar industry. There,
when the ACC proposed a modification to the net-metering policies to
make them more equitable to all utility customers, the solar industry
mounted an aggressive PR campaign in attempt to block any changes. When
the decision was made in November to add a monthly fee onto the utility
bills of new solar customers to make them pay for using the power grid, I
applauded the effort.

In light of this new issue, with a leading
solar company misleading customers, it is time for the nation’s
regulators to take a hard look at their states’ policies. Remember, this
past summer, Georgia regulators voted for solar leasing such as
SolarCity offers.

Pat Lyons, one of New Mexico’s Public
Regulatory Commissioners, watched what happened in Arizona’s net
metering battle. Upon learning about SolarCity’s potential deception, he
was alarmed. “As solar leasing, like SolarCity pushes, moves into
additional markets, regulators across the country need to be aware of
the potential pitfalls and misrepresentations.”

It is vital that
solar providers be held to the same high standard to which we hold our
electric utilities and are made to answer tough questions about consumer
protection, safety, and operation issues. Stump’s letter to SolarCity’s
CEO asked for responses to his questions by March 31 and said he will
“be placing this matter on a Commission open meeting agenda in the near
future in order to discuss these important concerns with my fellow
commissioners.”

It may be too late to protect some solar
customers in Tucson, but there is still a chance to make sure others are
treated fairly. If things don’t change, the dark clouds hovering over
the industry will be raining on unsuspecting customers.

White House looks to regulate cow flatulence as part of climate agenda

As
part of its plan to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, the Obama
administration is targeting the dairy industry to reduce methane
emissions in their operations.

This comes despite falling methane emission levels across the economy since 1990.

The
White House has proposed cutting methane emissions from the dairy
industry by 25 percent by 2020. Although U.S. agriculture only accounts
for about 9 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, according
to the Environmental Protection Agency, it makes up a sizeable portion
of methane emissions — which is a very potent greenhouse gas.

Some
of these methane emissions come from cow flatulence, exhaling and
belching — other livestock animals release methane as well.

“Cows
emit a massive amount of methane through belching, with a lesser amount
through flatulence,” according to How Stuff Works. “Statistics vary
regarding how much methane the average dairy cow expels. Some experts
say 100 liters to 200 liters a day… while others say it’s up to 500
liters… a day. In any case, that’s a lot of methane, an amount
comparable to the pollution produced by a car in a day.”

“Of all
domestic animal types, beef and dairy cattle were by far the largest
emitters of [methane],” according to an EPA analysis charting greenhouse
gas emissions in 2012. Cows and other animals produce methane through
digestion, which ferments the food of animals.

“During digestion,
microbes resident in an animal’s digestive system ferment food consumed
by the animal,” the EPA notes. “This microbial fermentation process,
referred to as enteric fermentation, produces [methane] as a byproduct,
which can be exhaled or eructated by the animal.”

It’s not just
the dairy industry that the Obama administration is clamping down on.
The White House is looking to regulate methane emissions across the
economy from agriculture to oil and gas operations — all this despite
methane emissions falling 11 percent since 1990.

Methane
emissions have largely been reduced because of the incentive for
companies to capture it and sell it for monetary gain. Oil and gas
companies, for example, have been looking for ways to increasingly
capture methane leaked from drilling operations which they can then
sell.

“The industry has led efforts to reduce emissions of
methane by developing new technologies and equipment, and recent studies
show emissions are far lower than EPA projected just a few years ago,”
said Howard Feldman, head of scientific and regulatory affairs
at the American Petroleum Institute. “Additional regulations are
not necessary and could have a chilling effect on the American energy
renaissance, our economy, and our national security.”

“Methane is
natural gas that operators can bring to the market,” he added. “There
is a built-in incentive to capture these emissions.”

Environmentalists
have been pushing the Obama administration to crack down on methane
emissions for some time, arguing that they drive global warming and
pollute the air and water. Activists have argued that the methane
leakage rate from natural gas operations is 50 percent higher than the
EPA estimates.

“President Obama’s plan to reduce
climate-disrupting methane pollution is an important step in reining in
an out of control industry exempt from too many public health
protections,” Deborah Nardone, campaign director of the Sierra Club’s
Keeping Dirty Fuels in the Ground campaign. “However, even with the most
rigorous methane controls and monitoring in place, we will still fall
short of what is needed to fight climate disruption if we do not reduce
our reliance on these dirty fossil fuels.”

Republicans and the
oil and gas industry argue that the methane leakage rate has been
estimated to be 50 times lower than the EPA’s estimate. The GOP argues
that the EPA’s estimate is simply an attack on hydraulic fracturing, or
fracking.

“The EPA has been on a witch hunt to shut down
hydraulic fracturing, and yet again the evidence doesn’t back up their
excessive claims,” said Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter. “All too
often we see the Agency using flawed science for political purposes,
but this report – partially funded by environmental activists no less –
shows EPA’s emissions estimates from hydraulic fracturing are way off.”

That
one of the founders of Greenpeace now disses global warming disturbs
people who rely on authority for their opinions. So Moore is
regularly misrepresented by Warmists. He replies below to one such
misrepresentation in "The Missoulian"

Dear Editor,

I must reply to the nasty characterization
of myself by Ron Scholl (Climate Change: Information not Exactly
Credible, March 28). He makes a number of false statements, including to
question my credibility as a scientist.

For his information I
hold an Honours B.Sc. in Biology and Forest Biology, a Ph.D in Ecology,
an Honorary Doctorate of Science from North Carolina State University
and in 2009 received the National Award for Nuclear Science and History
from the Einstein Society. In 1989 I founded the British Columbia Carbon
Project and ever since have remained abreast of the climate change
discussion on a daily basis.

In my testimony before the US Senate
I simply stated “There is no scientific proof that humans are the main
cause of the minor warming that has occurred over past 150 years.” This
is why the IPCC uses the word “likely” when it states that humans are
the main cause. This is a judgement (opinion), not a proof. If there was
an actual scientific proof they would write it down on a piece of paper
and show it to us.

Mr. Scholl also claims that I am not a
co-founder of Greenpeace. If would take the time to Google “Who are the
Founders of Greenpeace”, he would find my name clearly displayed. Just
because Greenpeace has tried to write me out of their history doesn’t
actually change historical fact. I was in the leadership of Greenpeace
for 15 years, from the first campaign against US H-Bomb testing in 1971
until 1986 when I left due to disagreements on points of science and
policy. Today Greenpeace campaigns are mainly based on sensation,
misinformation, and fear. I prefer to base my environmental policies on
science and logic.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

30 March, 2014

Yet another problem of global warming?

This is supposed to be a science process?

The IPCC clearly does politics, not science

Government
officials and scientists are gathered in Yokohama this week to wrangle
over every line of a summary of the report before the final wording is
released on Monday – the first update in seven years.

Nearly 500
people must sign off on the exact wording of the summary, including the
66 expert authors, 271 officials from 115 countries, and 57 observers.

But
governments have already signed off on the critical finding that
climate change is already having an effect, and that even a small amount
of warming in the future could lead to "abrupt and irreversible
changes"

Did Nate Silver take down the Roger Pielke article in response to a campaign by a tiny minority of malcontents?

Lubos Motl

Nate
Silver is a statistician who has analyzed baseball and elections. I
don't know him but it seems that some other people do. At any rate, he
started a new expensive online news server FiveThirtyEight.com (the
number is 538). Some mostly left-wing pundits have criticized the new
server and made its childhood a rocky experience.

The first study
he happened to publish on that server was one by Dr Roger Pielke Jr, a
"climate lukewarmer" [in the middle between skeptics and alarmists] who
does research into damages caused by meteorological phenomena:

Disasters Cost More Than Ever — But Not Because of Climate Change (by Pielke)

His
main point is simple: the absolute amount of money destroyed by natural
disasters is increasing but so is the total GDP. The ratio stays pretty
much constant – as he demonstrates by some graph from the Munich Re
reinsurance company – and it should.

(Well, there is even some
decrease that seems statistically insignificant; if it ever became
significant, it would probably be due to people's increasing ability to
protect their assets.)

There exists no scientific or otherwise
rational reason to think that the "losses to GDP" ratio should be
significantly changing with time. As people are getting wealthier, they
have more assets that may be destroyed by unpleasant weather and so on.

Needless
to say, a "lukewarmer" like Pielke Jr is a sufficient heretic for the
climate activists to go ballistic; his claims – self-evidently correct
claims – were a blasphemy. So they have spammed the comment section with
tons of negative comments (80% of comments were claimed to be
negative), posted a long pseudoscientific rebuttal at
SkepticalScience.COM, a rant at Salon.COM mentioning the grilling of
Silver by Jon Stewart, a diatribe at HuffPo, and dozens of other
anti-Pielke replies on assorted far left-wing servers and blogs.

All
the data I can access are consistent with the hypothesis that all these
insane anti-skeptic "fireworks" you can see on the Internet and in the
media are the result of an orchestrated campaign by 25 or fewer unhinged
alarmist trolls, at least 90% of the "fireworks".

This is
actually the mean value of my estimate. Such a claim may sound
remarkable but people who don't have access to any data about the
visitors and commenters on a website generally underestimate how
intensely amplified the visibility of certain views becomes due to the
relentless work of a very small number of obsessed trolls and spammers.

I
am fortunately not getting too many truly obnoxious comments these
days. But during the last 3 months, I got about 5 comments from
different posters praising guest posts on The Reference Frame, with the
implicit suggestion that I should stop writing my own essays. OK
individual opinions, I thought for a while. After all, I try to pick
high-quality guest bloggers (and yes, I prefer native speakers,
something I am not) so if the comparison ends up in this way, it
shouldn't shock me.

However, when I saw the fifth comment of this
sort, I finally checked the IP addresses. Needless to say, every single
comment from this set was posted by the very same user in Halifax,
Canada. Without this check (I am not doing them often, but sometimes I
am), I could easily believe that there were 5 people holding this
opinion; in reality, there was just 1 troll. This is just one recent
anecdote but over the years, I have accumulated many stories of this
kind. The general conclusion seems clear to me: on the Internet, a huge
fraction of the "violent opposition" to some opinions is created by a
tiny group of people.

The critics that were mentioned as contributors to Silver's apology by the media belonged to this list:

Michael MannKevin TrenberthRob HoneycuttDana1981... and a few others.

Have
I seen the names before? You bet. All of them belong to the
aforementioned "list of 25 top climate alarmist trolls". They keep on
trolling, trolling, trolling. They are spamming, spamming, spamming.
They are attacking, attacking, attacking climate skeptics. They are
whining, whining, whining that they were unfairly attacked even though
they haven't. They are lying 24 hours a day. Michael Mann is threatening
others with lawsuits all the time (and sometimes even sues, being
supported by some really immoral wealthy individuals), yet he has the
breathtaking arrogance to claim that it's others who are threatening
him. They are doing these things all the time, seven days a week, 52 or
53 weeks a year, and a large percentage of the "climatic portion of the
blogosphere" is created by this small group of people. If you removed
these trolls from the surface of the globe, climate alarmism would
pretty much cease to exist on the Internet. Incidentally, yes, this is
my recipe how to solve the climate problem.

I find it sort of
shocking that people like Nate Silver who should already know something
about the "behavioral science about the Internet commenters" and about
the sociology of the climate debate – election-related statistics are
not too far from this discipline – still fail to understand these
points. I find it shocking that they still get manipulated by these
aggressive yet intrinsically inconsequential scumbags and crackpots.

Let
me just mention one graph – the only "apparently non-trivial" argument
against Pielke's assertions that I have seen anywhere in the hurricane
of vitriol directed against his self-evident assertions. You see that
the "number of natural catastrophes" has more than doubled over the last
30 years. But one must be careful about the definition of a "natural
catastrophe". Note that in 1980, the world population was less than 4.5
bilion, so it has "almost" doubled since that time, too. Moreover, the
people are much wealthier and they have many more things that may be
damaged or insured and damages of these things count as "natural
catastrophes".

My point is that the quantity "number of natural
catastrophes" doesn't really have a robust, time-independent definition
here. If you actually look at the overall money which have a much more
robust definition, as Pielke did, you will see that the claims or losses
were increasing proportionally to the total GDP.

There's one
more observation that is being mentioned by Pielke's critics: the number
of "geophysical events" like earthquakes, tsunami, and volcanic
eruption wasn't substantially increasing – only "the weather got worse".
But they always prefer to automatically assume that any such asymmetry
is due to their favorite "climate change". The actual reason of the
unequal growth is simply that people may escape from the places where
earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions are occurring because
these places are known and ultimately determined by the fault lines,
tectonic plates, and other geological entities. On the other hand, one
can't really escape bad weather! So the rate of the increase of the
concentration of people and their wealth in "geologically risky" places
was much smaller (and insurance companies wouldn't insure you at certain
places) than the concentration of people in places where "bad weather"
may occur (which is the whole surface of the Earth).

At any rate,
the right interpretation of all these graphs is a science of a sort. It
is not as hard a science as particle physics. But one needs some
expertise. And Roger Pielke Jr has accumulated about 10,000 citations by
work focusing on these questions – despite the fact that his basic
philosophy wasn't exactly aligned with the political establishment of
the Academia. Why would Nate Silver surrender to 25 trolls whose total
number of citations in these matters is 100 times lower than those of
Roger Pielke Jr? And if Nate Silver thinks that the total loudness of
the trolls is more important than the truth and the people's expertise,
why did he hire Roger Pielke Jr to write the piece in the first place?
Why didn't he establish a new server as a footnote to a random
crackpot's blog, for example as 538.SkepticalScience.COM? A researcher
(or an essayist) who may only conclude what the majority already
believes is a useless parasite.

Roger Pielke Jr isn't necessarily
my "#1 cup of tea" but I can still see that Nate Silver's behavior
towards him was disrespectful. More generally, the freedom of expression
and journalism ethics seems to be evaporating from the Internet in the
U.S. that is increasingly controlled by the aforementioned groups of
violent trolls and by the group think they want to impose – and they
have already imposed in vast portions of the American Internet and the
American society. Twenty-five years ago, I wouldn't predict that I would
be writing these things in 2014. But it's true, anyway: I think that
the freedom of expression – especially journalists' freedom to evaluate
the data in the way they see fit – is much better e.g. in Russia these
days than it is in the U.S. And despite all the annoying trends I am
observing, I think that the journalism ethics and especially the freedom
of expression is in a much better shape in Czechia than it is in either
of the countries above.

I have embedded Robert Foster's ("funny
fake rapping media host") "report" about the recent Russian-American
tension. He is doing fun of both sides and makes some good points –
well, at least good for those who are not following the events in any
objective way. The funny video was reposted by Russia Today but I am
afraid that it would be censored in all the U.S. media that look at
themselves way too seriously when they moralize about the "evils" done
by Russia. Around 4:20, journalist Abby Martin adds her contribution to
the rap, too. She is saying things that Putin would probably disagree
with – but she can do so despite her being an employee of the
Kremlin-funded Russia Today. I think that nowadays, the journalists in
MSNBC or other American TV channels wouldn't be able (well, I mean
"wouldn't be allowed") to display their editorial independence and
freedom of expression in this way. It would be enough for a few
left-wing jerks like Michael Mann to launch an e-mail campaign against
anything they find inconvenient and in the evening, the boss of the news
would already be apologizing for and firing the blasphemous employee.

So
I have grown increasingly disillusioned by the status of human rights
and professional ethics in the U.S. It's a system de facto controlled by
several cliques of aggressive fascists who are blackmailing everyone
who is inconvenient them, who are spamming the Internet and news with
lies, whining, demagogy, and character assassinations, and who are using
the gullible brainwashed sheep – the average Americans – both as a
weapon and as a final target to be conquered. Couldn't at least one Nate
Silver find the balls to tell Manns and Trenberths of this world "fuck
you"? It's probably too much to ask.

As the anthem indicates, the
U.S. may have been a "land of the brave and the free" sometime in the
past. But these days, it's mainly a country of spineless unfree cowards
like Nate Silver.

One
problem in arguments about climate (and many other things) is that most
of the information is obtained at second, third, or fourth hand, with
the result that what you believe depends largely on what sources of
information you trust. One result is that people on either side of the
argument can honestly believe that the evidence strongly supports their
view. They trust different sources; different sources report different
evidence. It is thus particularly interesting when on some point, even a
fairly minor one, you can actually check a claim for yourself. I
believe I have found an example of such a claim.

Cook et. al.
(2013) is the paper, possibly one of two papers, on which the often
repeated claim that 97% of climate scientists support global warming is
based. Legates et. al. (2013) is a paper which criticizes Cook et. al.
(2013). Bedford and Cook (2013) is a response to Legates et. al. All
three papers (the last a pre-publication version) are webbed, although
Legates et. al. is unfortunately behind a pay wall.

Bedford and
Cook (2013) contains the following sentence: "Cook et al. (2013) found
that over 97% endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human
emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause."

To check that
claim, look at Cook et. al. 2013. Table 2 shows three categories of
endorsement of global warming reflected in the abstracts of articles.
Category 1, explicit endorsement with quantification, is described as
"Explicitly states that humans are the primary cause of recent global
warming."

Category 2 is explicit endorsement without
quantification. The description, "Explicitly states humans are causing
global warming or refers to anthropogenic global warming/climate change
as a known fact" is ambiguous, since neither "causing" nor
"anthropogenic global warming" specifies how large a part of warming
humans are responsible for. But the example for the category is clearer:
'Emissions of a broad range of greenhouse gases of varying lifetimes
contribute to global climate change.' If human action produces ten
percent of warming, it contributes to it, hence category 2, as implied
by its label, does not specify how large a fraction of the warming
humans are responsible for.

Category 3, implicit
endorsement, again uses the ambiguous "are causing," but the example is
'...carbon sequestration in soil is important for mitigating global
climate change,' which again would be consistent with holding that CO2
was responsible for some but less than half of the warming. It follows
that only papers in category 1 imply that "human emissions of greenhouse
gases are the main cause." Authors of papers in categories 2 and 3
might believe that, they might believe that human emissions of
greenhouse gases were one cause among several.

Reading down in
Cook et. al., we find "To simplify the analysis, ratings were
consolidated into three groups: endorsements (including implicit and
explicit; categories 1–3 in table 2)." It is that combined group,
("endorse AGW" on Table 4) that the 97.1% figure refers to. Hence that
is the number of papers that, according to Cook et. al., implied that
humans at least contribute to global warming. The number that imply that
humans are the primary cause (category 1) is some smaller percentage
which Cook et. al. do not report.

It follows that the sentence I
quoted from Bedford and Cook is false. Cook et. al. did not find that
"over 97% endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human
emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause." (emphasis mine). Any
interested reader can check that it is false by simply comparing the two
papers of which Cook is a co-author. John Cook surely knows the
contents of his own paper. Hence the sentence in question is a
deliberate lie.

That Cook misrepresents the result of his own
research does not tell us whether AGW or CAGW is true. It does not tell
us if it is true that most climate scientists endorse AGW or CAGW. It is
nonetheless interesting, for two related reasons.

In recent
online exchanges on climate, I repeatedly encountered the claim that 97%
of climate scientists believed humans were the main cause of global
warming. That included an exchange with one of the very few reasonable
and civil supporters of the CAGW claim that I encountered in the online
arguments, where most participants on either side are neither. So far as
I know, the paper says nothing that is not true. But it appears
designed to encourage the misreading that actually occurred. It does so
by lumping together categories 1-3 and reporting only the sum and by
repeatedly referring to "the consensus" but never stating clearly what
that consensus is.

The closest it came to defining the consensus
is as the "position that humans are causing global warming," which
leaves it unclear whether "causing" means "are one cause of," "are the
chief cause of," or "are the sole cause of." To discover that it meant
only the former, a reader had to pay sufficiently careful attention to
the details of the paper to notice "contribute to" in the example of
category 2 in Table 2, which few readers would do. The fact that Cook
chose, in a second paper, to misrepresent the result of the first is
pretty good evidence that the presentation of his results was
deliberately designed to mislead.

There is a second, and more
important, reason why all of this matters. Beliefs on either side depend
largely on what sources of information you trust. I have now provided
unambiguous evidence, evidence that anyone on either side willing to
carefully read Cook (2013) and check what it says against what Bedford
and Cook claims it says can verify for himself, that John Cook cannot be
trusted. The blog Skeptical Science lists John Cook as its maintainer,
hence all claims on that blog ought to be viewed with suspicion and
accepted only if independently verified. Since, as a prominent supporter
of the position that warming is primarily due to humans and a very
serious threat, Cook is taken seriously and quoted by other supporters
of that position, one should reduce one's trust in those others as well.
Either they too are dishonest or they are over willing to believe false
claims that support their position.

The fact that one prominent
supporter of a position is dishonest does not prove that the position is
wrong. For all I know, there may be people on the other side who could
be shown to be dishonest by a similar analysis. But it is a reason why
those who support that side because they trust its proponents to tell
them the truth should be at least somewhat less willing to do so.

P.S.
A commenter has located the data file for Cook et. al. (2013). By his
count, the number of articles classified into each category was:

The
97% figure was the sum of levels 1-3. Assuming the count is
correct—readers can check it for themselves—that 97% breaks down as:

Level 1: 1.6%Level 2: 23%Level 3: 72%

Only
Level 1 corresponds to "the Earth is warming up and human emissions of
greenhouse gases are the main cause." (emphasis mine) Hence when John
Cook attributed that view to 97% on the basis of his Cook et. al. (2013)
he was misrepresenting 1.6% as 97%. Adding up his categories 5-7, the
levels of rejecting of AGW, we find that more papers explicitly or
implicitly rejected the claim that human action was responsible for half
or more of warming than accepted it. According to Cook's own data.

Would
anybody now like to claim that lumping levels 1, 2, and 3 together and
only reporting the sum was not a deliberate attempt to mislead?

The
World Health Organization (WHO) has released its latest figures on the
annual death toll caused by pollution--and they look shocking. Of all
the deaths across the globe in 2012, no fewer than seven million--1 in
8--are apparently the result of pollution.

Even if you take the
WHO's estimates with a huge pinch of salt--and you probably should--that
doesn't mean the pollution problem in some parts of the world isn't
deadly serious. During the 20th century, around 260 million are reckoned
to have died from indoor pollution in the developing world: that's
roughly twice as many as were killed in all the century's wars.

Here, though, is the point where the WHO loses all credibility on the issue.

"Excessive air pollution is often a by-product of unsustainable
policies in sectors such as transport, energy, waste management and
industry. In most cases, healthier strategies will also be more
economical in the long term due to health-care cost savings as well as
climate gains," Carlos Dora, WHO Coordinator for Public Health,
Environmental and Social Determinants of Health said.

"WHO and health sectors have a unique role in translating scientific
evidence on air pollution into policies that can deliver impact and
improvements that will save lives," Dr. Dora added."

See what
Dora just did there? He used the shock value of the WHO's pollution
death figures to slip three Big Lies under the impressionable reader's
radar.

First, he's trying to make out that outdoor pollution is
as big a problem as indoor pollution. It isn't: nowhere near. Many of
the deaths the WHO links to the former are very likely the result of the
latter (cooking and heating in poorly ventilated rooms using dung,
wood, and coal) which, by nature, is much more intense.

Secondly,
he's implying that economic development is to blame. In fact, it's
economic development we have to thank for the fact that there are so
many fewer pollution deaths than there used to be. As Bjorn Lomborg has
noted, over the 20th century as poverty receded and clean fuels got
cheaper, the risk of dying of pollution decreased eight-fold. In 1900,
air pollution cost 23 per cent of global GDP; today it is 6 per cent,
and by 2050 it will be 4 per cent.

But the third and by far the
biggest of the lies is the implication that the UN's policies on climate
change are helping to alleviate the problem.

In fact the opposite is true. It's the UN's policies on climate change which are killing the world's poor.

Two
years ago, at the Rio + 20 Earth Summit, UN Secretary General Ban
Ki-Moon launched a program of "sustainable energy for all."

But
"sustainable energy" is often merely an environmentalist euphemism for
costly, inefficient, intermittent, unreliable renewable energy--such as
solar or wind: a heavily subsidized, first-world luxury which no
developing country could possibly afford because it makes no economic
sense.

Another energy form that would fit into the "sustainable"
category would be "biomass"--ie dung, vegetation--which is the very
thing responsible for all those indoor pollution deaths.

The
surest, quickest way to reduce pollution deaths in the developing world
would be to develop a stable electric grid system so that people could
keep themselves warm and cook relatively cleanly. But thanks to the UN's
obsession with "climate change" this opportunity is being denied
developing countries. The World Bank now more or less refuses to finance
the building of any coal-fired power stations in places like Africa in
order to promote "alternative energy sources." This anti-cheap energy
policy has been endorsed by the Obama administration.

As one Ugandan writer once put it:

"Al Gore uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans
together use in a year. And those anti-electricity policies are keeping
us impoverished.

Not having electricity means
millions of Africans don’t have refrigerators to preserve food and
medicine. Outside of wealthy parts of our big cities, people don’t have
lights, computers, modern hospitals and schools, air conditioning – or
offices, factories and shops to make things and create good jobs.

Not having electricity also means disease and death. It means millions
die from lung infections, because they have to cook and heat with open
fires; from intestinal diseases caused by spoiled food and unsafe
drinking water; from malaria, TB, cholera, measles and other diseases
that we could prevent or treat if we had proper medical facilities."

If
the WHO's mother organization the United Nations wanted to stop those
seven million pollution deaths, it could do so in short space.
Unfortunately, like so many of those involved in global governance these
days, it gives Gaia worship higher priority than the lives of the
world's poor.

Even while it exaggerates the amount of warming, the IPCC is becoming more cautious about its effects

The
United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will shortly
publish the second part of its latest report, on the likely impact of
climate change. Government representatives are meeting with scientists
in Japan to sex up—sorry, rewrite—a summary of the scientists' accounts
of storms, droughts and diseases to come. But the actual report, known
as AR5-WGII, is less frightening than its predecessor seven years ago.

The
2007 report was riddled with errors about Himalayan glaciers, the
Amazon rain forest, African agriculture, water shortages and other
matters, all of which erred in the direction of alarm. This led to a
critical appraisal of the report-writing process from a council of
national science academies, some of whose recommendations were simply
ignored.

Others, however, hit home. According to leaks, this time
the full report is much more cautious and vague about worsening
cyclones, changes in rainfall, climate-change refugees, and the overall
cost of global warming.

It puts the overall cost at less than 2%
of GDP for a 2.5 degrees Centigrade (or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit)
temperature increase during this century. This is vastly less than the
much heralded prediction of Lord Stern, who said climate change would
cost 5%-20% of world GDP in his influential 2006 report for the British
government.

The forthcoming report apparently admits that climate
change has extinguished no species so far and expresses "very little
confidence" that it will do so. There is new emphasis that climate
change is not the only environmental problem that matters and on
adapting to it rather than preventing it. Yet the report still assumes
70% more warming by the last decades of this century than the best
science now suggests. This is because of an overreliance on models
rather than on data in the first section of the IPCC report—on physical
science—that was published in September 2013.

In this space on
Dec. 19, 2012, I forecast that the IPCC was going to have to lower its
estimates of future warming because of new sensitivity results.
(Sensitivity is the amount of warming due to a doubling of atmospheric
carbon dioxide.) "Cooling Down Fears of Climate Change" (Dec. 19), led
to a storm of protest, in which I was called "anti-science," a "denier"
and worse.

The IPCC's September 2013 report abandoned any attempt
to estimate the most likely "sensitivity" of the climate to a doubling
of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The explanation, buried in a technical
summary not published until January, is that "estimates derived from
observed climate change tend to best fit the observed surface and ocean
warming for [sensitivity] values in the lower part of the likely range."
Translation: The data suggest we probably face less warming than the
models indicate, but we would rather not say so.

The Global
Warming Policy Foundation, a London think tank, published a careful
survey of all the reliable studies of sensitivity on March 5. The
authors are British climate scientist Nic Lewis (who has no academic
affiliation but a growing reputation since he discovered a glaring
statistical distortion that exaggerated climate sensitivity in the
previous IPCC report) and the Dutch science writer Marcel Crok. They say
the IPCC's September report "buried good news about global warming,"
and that "the best observational evidence indicates our climate is
considerably less sensitive to greenhouse gases than climate scientists
had previously thought."

Messrs. Lewis and Crok argue that the
average of the best observationally based studies shows the amount of
immediate warming to be expected if carbon dioxide levels double after
70 years is "likely" to be between one and two degrees Centigrade, with a
best estimate of 1.35C (or 2.4F). That's much lower than the IPCC
assumes in its forthcoming report.

In short, the warming we
experienced over the past 35 years—about 0.4C (or 0.7F) if you average
the measurements made by satellites and those made by ground stations—is
likely to continue at about the same rate: a little over a degree a
century.

Briefly during the 1990s there did seem to be warming
that went as fast as the models wanted. But for the past 15-17 years
there has been essentially no net warming (a "hiatus" now conceded by
the IPCC), a fact that the models did not predict and now struggle to
explain. The favorite post-hoc explanation is that because of natural
variability in ocean currents more heat has been slipping into the ocean
since 2000—although the evidence for this is far from conclusive.

None
of this contradicts basic physics. Doubling carbon dioxide cannot on
its own generate more than about 1.1C (2F) of warming, however long it
takes. All the putative warming above that level would come from
amplifying factors, chiefly related to water vapor and clouds. The net
effect of these factors is the subject of contentious debate.

In
climate science, the real debate has never been between "deniers" and
the rest, but between "lukewarmers," who think man-made climate change
is real but fairly harmless, and those who think the future is alarming.
Scientists like Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology and
Richard Lindzen of MIT MITD -21.88% have moved steadily toward
lukewarm views in recent years.

Even with its too-high, too-fast
assumptions, the recently leaked draft of the IPCC impacts report makes
clear that when it comes to the effect on human welfare, "for most
economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to
the impacts of other drivers," such as economic growth and technology,
for the rest of this century. If temperatures change by about 1C degrees
between now and 2090, as Mr. Lewis calculates, then the effects will be
even smaller.

Indeed, a small amount of warming spread over a
long period will, most experts think, bring net improvements to human
welfare. Studies such as by the IPCC author and economist Professor
Richard Tol of Sussex University in Britain show that global warming has
probably done so already. People can adapt to such change—which
essentially means capture the benefits but minimize the harm. Satellites
have recorded a roughly 14% increase in greenery on the planet over the
past 30 years, in all types of ecosystems, partly as a result of
man-made CO2 emissions, which enable plants to grow faster and use less
water.

There remains a risk that the latest science is wrong and
rapid warming will occur with disastrous consequences. And if renewable
energy had proved by now to be cheap, clean and thrifty in its use of
land, then we would be right to address that small risk of a large
catastrophe by rushing to replace fossil fuels with first-generation
wind, solar and bioenergy. But since these forms of energy have proved
expensive, environmentally damaging and land-hungry, it appears that in
our efforts to combat warming we may have been taking the economic
equivalent of chemotherapy for a cold.

Almost every global
environmental scare of the past half century proved exaggerated
including the population "bomb," pesticides, acid rain, the ozone hole,
falling sperm counts, genetically engineered crops and killer bees. In
every case, institutional scientists gained a lot of funding from the
scare and then quietly converged on the view that the problem was much
more moderate than the extreme voices had argued. Global warming is no
different.

To
the surprise of many, the Obama administration seems to be taking a
positive look at exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) to European
nations, particularly Ukraine, in an effort to cut Russian influence in
the region. “The situation in Ukraine proves the need to reinforce
energy security in Europe and we are considering new collaborative
efforts to achieve this goal. We welcome the prospect of U.S. LNG
exports in the future since additional global supplies will benefit
Europe and other strategic partners,” said the administration in a
release.

A good first step would be to expedite decisions on
exporting LNG to countries with which we do not have a free-trade
agreement. So far the Department of Energy has approved just seven such
deals, with a backlog of 24 more in the pipeline.

But a much more
important step is investment in infrastructure to export LNG, and one
such project in Washington's backyard is under attack from
environmentalists. Cove Point, in southern Maryland, was built more than
30 years ago as an import facility, but owner Dominion Resources wants
to invest over $3 billion to convert it to an export terminal.

Replicating
a strategy that has thus far prevented natural gas extraction in
Marcellus Shale states like Maryland and New York, environmentalists
want to scuttle the project by studying it to death, asking the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission to do an exhaustive “environmental impact”
study. They're claiming that approving the Cove Point project would
produce a negative greenhouse gas impact. “Building a new LNG terminal
doesn't strengthen our nation, and it further disrupts our climate,”
sniffled Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune.

Meanwhile,
350.org founder Bill McKibben warned Democrats that they won't escape
notice if they back the project because it encourages more
“exploitation” of resources. “Fracking's become a dirty word, for good
reason,” McKibben opined.

But the geopolitical benefits of
eventually reducing Europe's dependence on Russian natural gas may
convince regulators to ignore these radical environmentalists.
Ironically, many of these same nations have instituted their own bans on
fracking but will be happy to buy our natural gas. Perhaps the
environmentalists should just move there and await our energy bailout.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

28 March, 2014

A naive survey

James Lawrence Powell
has recently updated his survey of academic journal articles concerned
with climate. And he concludes that: "10,883 out of 10,885
scientific articles agree: Global warming is happening, and humans are
to blame".

I have probably said most of what can be said about
all that on some previous occasion but perhaps a recap of the basics
might still be useful.

His big mistake is to get his taxonomy
wrong. Taxonomy is the first step in science but not, apparently,
for James Lawrence Powell. He just does not realize that most
climate skeptics would fall into his "believer" category!

The
great majority of climate skeptics accept that a warming response to CO2
is a reasonable theory so they don't get detected as skeptics by James
Lawrence Powell. Where most climate skeptics differ from the
hysterics is in estimating the magnitude of the warming effect.
Skeptics say that Greenies greatly overestimate and exaggerate any
possible effects of CO2 buildup.

I myself can see
theoretical grounds for expecting that CO2 buildup will have a warming
effect but those same theoretical grounds lead me to believe that the
effect will be so minute as to be probably undetectable.

And that
is what we find. CO2 and temperature each go their own merry way
quite independently of one-another. Temperature does vary at times
in response to various natural causes (mostly solar) but a response to
CO2 is not detectable.

The most glaring example of that is of
course the temperature standstill of the last 17 years while atmospheric
CO2 has steadily been rising. The two variables are clearly
uncoupled.

Pumping out exaggerated cries of alarm is of course
what Greenies do so the fact that they have chosen just about the most
alarming figure possible for the influence of CO2 on temperature should
surprise no-one. Reality eventually trashes most of their wild
claims however and this is no exception.

Just for a bit of fun,
have a look at the graph below. It is two excerpts from the
temperature record. The IPCC says that human influence did not
begin until 1950 -- so temperature variations before that must be due to
natural influences. Yet the slopes of the two graphs
are virtually identical. So if one can be all natural, why is the
other not natural too? -- JR

The full graph is here. AMO is a running index of North Atlantic temperatures from NOAA.

Greenies have won the war in Britain

by Tim Worstall

I
both know and like Nick Cohen but it's also necessary to call out this
extremely strange argument he made in The Observer. He seems to think
that "climate change deniers" have won the war and that therefore all is
doomed. When, actually, here in the UK at least, the government has
already put in place the mainstream scientific remedy for the perils of
climate change. We've actually already solved the problem:

If
global warming is not new, it is urgent: a subject that should never be
far from our thoughts. Yet within 24 hours of the American association's
warning the British government's budget confirmed that it no longer
wanted to fight it. David Cameron, who once promised that if you voted
blue you would go green, now appoints Owen Paterson, a man who is not
just ignorant of environmental science but proud of his ignorance, as
his environment secretary.

George Osborne, who once promised
that his Treasury would be "at the heart of this historic fight against
climate change", now gives billions in tax concessions to the oil and
gas industry, cuts the funds for onshore wind farms and strips the Green
Investment Bank of the ability to borrow and lend

All of which
is a long way of saying that the global warming deniers have won. And
please, can I have no emails from bed-wetting kidults blubbing that you
can't call us "global warming deniers " because "denier" makes us sound
like "Holocaust deniers", and that means you are comparing us to Nazis?
The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of
Auschwitz. No other word will do.

To take my standard position
here: let's assume that the IPCC is correct and see where that
assumption takes us. That assumption takes us to the standard economics
of how to deal with an externality. Some version of either cap and trade
or a Pigou Tax will solve the entire problem for us. And we even have
things like the Stern Review (or, giving us slightly different numbers
for a variety of reasons, the work of Richard Tol and William Nordhaus)
telling us how much that carbon tax should be: $80 per tonne CO2-e.

So,
if the climate change deniers, whoever they are, have won we should see
that there's no cap and trade program and no carbon tax. But if we look
up at the world that we actually inhabit, what is it that we do see? We
see that the EU has a cap and trade programme. Emissions are limited,
exactly as the standard economics of the problem tell us they should be.
Here in the UK we also have a carbon tax: in power generation it's been
done in the rather silly manner of a floor to the price for a carbon
emissions permit but while this is inefficient it does do the job. We
have raised taxes on petrol (the fuel duty escalator) by twice what that
Stern calculation would tell us we ought to. We have Air Passenger Duty
which is again above that Stern calculation. In fact, when you add up
all of the various green taxes we already pay on emissions we find that
we're considerably over the amount that Stern said would be the optimal
Pigou Tax to solve the problem.

No, really: I get some very odd
looks when I try to explain this to people but it is actually true. If
we accept the IPCC, then again accept the Stern Review, we have already
put in place all of the policies necessary to solve climate change as a
problem according to both the IPCC and the Stern Review findings.

And I simply cannot work out at all how this is supposed to be a victory for climate change deniers.

Recently
almost 30 Democratic United States Senators stayed up all night taking
turns delivering speeches about the importance of climate change and
getting lowering the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere.

The event
was organized to try and raise public visibility of the issue in hopes
of forcing Congress to pass legislation aimed at reducing carbon-dioxide
emissions. “Sure we should use all of our resources, but what we really
need is a comprehensive strategy that reduces CO2 emissions,” said
Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA).

While these Senators emitted lots of
CO2 in the chamber for 15 hours, they are misinformed about the facts.
Humans have been fertilizing Earth’s greenery worldwide, but not with
nitrogen-based fertilizer that runs into the rivers and oceans with very
negative effects. We have been raising the level of CO2, which has no
negative effect on any plant or animal life.

There is no instance
of CO2 being a pollutant; ask any chemistry professor. CO2 is
colorless, odorless, and tasteless. The vapors you are shown bellowing
from the various smoke stacks are not CO2, although some may be present.
The colorful emissions the media shows you secretly imply they contain
what is referred to as CO2 pollution.

Since CO2 is not a
pollutant, what impact does it have? As we learned in the third grade,
CO2 is what plants eat. The more of it they eat, the faster and larger
they grow, including the food crops. It is also a mild greenhouse gas
that helps warm the Earth somewhat. Most plants and trees also respond
favorably to a modest warming. With more moisture in reasonably warm air
than in cold, dry air, all three key ingredients are present: food,
water and warmth.

This knowledge should start opening the eyes of
Americans who have been deluged with propaganda from alarmist
organizations that are trying to scare us that our planet is under
attack by CO2.

Let’s examine and debunk some charges that these Democratic Senators and “warmist groups” make:

The
rate and magnitude of recent warming is unprecedented. This is
absolutely false. A number of peer-reviewed studies, including the
journal Climate Dynamics, recently concluded that average global
temperatures stopped warming a full 15 years ago. Looking farther back,
there have been many periods of rapid warming before man’s measurable
release of CO2.

The number and intensity of major hurricanes and
tornadoes is rising. The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season was the first
Atlantic hurricane season since 1994 to end with no known major
hurricanes. Data published by Florida State University indicates global
cyclonic intensity has been trending down for 20 years.

Droughts
and floods are more frequent and intense. Again false. According to 106
peer-reviewed global drought and 47 global flood studies, this is not
true.

Forest fires and acreage destroyed have intensified. The
National Interagency Fire Center statistics of total wild land fires and
acres destroyed from 1960 to 2012 concludes that there is no evidence
to support this claim.

The rate of sea level rise is increasing.
Global statistics refute this claim. Sea level is continuing its rate of
rising 7 inches per century, unrelated to human contributions to global
warming.

The oceans are becoming more acidic. This is grossly
misleading. Mother Earth’s oceans are highly alkaline, not acidic, and
there is no evidence human emissions can cause Earth’s oceans to become
acidic.

Why has Earth been warming for 300 years, not just since
the Industrial Revolution 150 years ago when CO2 begin to rise? Natural
factors have been occurring over and over, long before the Industrial
Revolution. Nothing new is taking place.

Climate models indicate
that Earth is likely to warm to dangerous levels by 2100. All of these
climate models are un-validated. They contain many assumptions that are
not supported by actual observations.

Do not just take the word
of this author, visit the website of former NASA scientists and
astronauts that provide insightful analysis at therightclimatestuff.com.
Ask these Senators to provide you with the actual scientific data to
support their statements. Please remember, un-validated models do not
produce scientific data.

Doesn’t everyone want robust habitats
and ecosystems, bountiful food crops, lush forests and grasslands? The
good news is that it is already happening. Humanity has been running a
real, worldwide experiment for a century and a half and it is paying
dividends. Mother Nature is responding positively to our real-life,
albeit inadvertent, actions that increase CO2 levels, and NASA satellite
data proves that Earth has grown greener for at least the past three
decades.

It
turns out that because of the emissions of extraordinarily potent
greenhouse gases NF3 and SF6 and energy during the manufacture of solar
modules, solar energy ends up being worse for the climate than burning
coal (assuming the global warming hypothesis is valid).

A Swiss
engineer has made a thorough analysis of the greenhouse gas emissions
caused by the manufacture, transport and operation of solar panels. His
conclusion:

Solar energy in Germany is climate killer no. 1!”

Ferrucio
Ferroni writes here how China is the number 1 manufacturer of solar
panels globally and that the production of solar panels there requires
immense amounts of electricity, which in China is mainly produced by
coal power plants. Moreover the manufacture of solar panels also
involves substantial amounts of potent greenhouse gases that leak out
into the atmosphere.

The result Ferroni writes:

The
comparison on CO2 emissions of a modern coal power plant and that of a
PV system shows that per kilowatt-hour of power produced, PV systems
damage the climate more. This statement is true if the hypothesis of the
IPCC is correct to start with.”

Ferroni writes that it is
accepted as fact the coal power plants emit carbon dioxide. But what is
little known is that PV systems also lead to the emission of
considerable quantities greenhouse gases – not during their operation,
but during their manufacture.

Ferroni writes that when
calculating the climate impacts of PV systems per unit, it is first
necessary to account for the energy used in their manufacture in China,
which involves the processing of solar silizium. Silizium processing
involves considerable amounts of chemicals and raw materials. Also the
manufacture of peripheral systems and their subsequent transport of
materials to Europe and North America and their modest outputs in many
northern locations have to be taken into account.

In comparison,
modern steam power plants using clean-coal-technology now reach an
efficiency of 52%, which means they emit 846 grams of CO2 per kWh when
powered with stone coal (heat value: 30 MJ/kg). Moreover, nowadays
highly efficient filters keep dust emissions to a minimum.

Producing 1 square meter requires 300 kg of coal

The
manufacture of the silizium for the panels is immensely
energy-intensive. According to Prof. Jian Shuisheng of the
Jiatong-University in Peking, one square meter of solar module
production requires more than 300 kg of coal, which leads to more than
1100 kg of CO2 emissions.

Also the production in China of
peripheral systems for PV systems, like frequency converters, batteries,
copper cable, switches, instruments etc., require fossil energy.
According to literature this is estimated to be an additional 13%. Thus
so far the emission for one square meter of solar module now adds up to
1243 kg CO2.

Potent gases needed for manufacturing solar modules

According
to Ferroni, the other huge drawback presented by PV systems are the
nasty chemicals and industrial gases used for their manufacture. The
production of solar panels in China entails nitrogen trifluoride (NF3)
and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), which are extremely potent heat-trapping
gases that leak out during the process. NF3 has a greenhouse gas potency
that is 16,600 times greater than CO2; SF6 is 23,900 times more potent.
Reports show that these gases emitted annually into the atmosphere from
the manufacture of solar panels is equivalent to over 70 million tonnes
of CO2 in terms of greenhouse effect. In 2010 over 17.5 GW of rated
capacity of solar cells were installed. Thus the emissions per square
meter of solar panels comes out to be 513 kg CO2 – a huge amount!

Other chemicals in the production process

The
manufacture of solar cells also uses other chemicals like (HCl),
silizium carbide, and silver among others. The total alleged warming
potential of these chemicals comes out to be an estimated 30 kg CO2 per
square meter of PV module. Oddly (likely to avoid embarrassment) the
solar industry has yet to release any detailed data on the warming
potential and impacts of the chemicals used in their manufacture.

Emissions-intensive transport

Also
the transport of the PV systems and modules represent a considerable
source of emissions. Ferroni writes that the transport of the systems
from China to Germany results in 23 kg CO2 per square meter of solar
module, more than what is used to transport coal from South Africa to
Europe.

In total 1809 kg of CO2 equivalent is emitted into the atmosphere per square meter of solar panel manufactured and transported.

Ferroni
then calculates that over the entire lifetime of a solar panel (25
years) one square meter will produce a total 2000 kwh in Germany. But
then there are losses from conversions and so the real value is closer
to 1850 kWh.

Over the entire lifetime and taking all factors into
account, Ferroni finds that each kwh of electricity produced by solar
modules emits 978g of CO2. How does this compare to coal? Ferroni:

In
comparison, a modern coal power plant emits 846 g CO2/kWh, i.e. about
13% less. As a result, under German conditions, PV modules are the no. 1
climate killers. By comparison a gas power plant is more advantageous
because its CO2 emissions are about half as much: approx.: 400g
CO2/kWh.”

John
Briscoe, a South African who spent most of his life working for the
World Bank, has just been awarded the Stockholm Water Prize, regarded by
some as the water equivalent of the Nobel. But after 40 years in the
development business, he is angry at the way in which rich people tell
poor people how to live their lives – and keep them in the dark. The
sooner a BRICS Bank is up and running, the better, he says. What has
made him so angry?

From his CV, US Senator Patrick Leahy looks
like a nice progressive guy, for an American career politician. He
supports organic farmers and renewable energy and has campaigned against
landmines and cluster weapons. So why did this man from Vermont, a
small, pretty state with a population considerably smaller than
Limpopo’s Vhembe district, decide to tell Africans to stay poor;
aggravate Southern Africa’s power shortage; and incidentally trash his
own President’s plan to “Power Africa”?

The answer helps to
illustrate the how American and European NGO politics impacts on poor
people without effective voice. It also shows just how vulnerable Africa
has been to foreign bullies. Fortunately, that era is coming to an end.
And not a moment too soon.

A decade ago, Uganda was running out
of electricity as the population and economy grew. Power cuts were
becoming increasingly frequent and factories were finding it difficult
to cope. The state power company and individual companies turned to
dirty and very expensive diesel generators. The transport of diesel by
tanker on the notorious Mombasa - Nairobi – Kampala road was profitable
for some but many industrial users could not afford the high prices and
simply shut up shop. Unemployment and poverty grew.

Uganda had an
alternative. At Jinja, where the Nile river flows from Lake Victoria,
the Owen Falls hydroelectric dam had been built in colonial times to
capture the river’s power. The Ugandan government planned to build a
further power station a few kilometres downstream, to double the power
generated by the controlled flow. But environmentalists, mainly
from the USA and Europe, objected and started lobbying the development
banks to stop the project. They alleged that the dam required would
displace large numbers of people, destroy local cultures and damage the
environment. They had little local support; their Ugandan associate, the
“National Association of Professional Environmentalists” was famously
documented by Washington Post reporter Sebastian Mallaby to have just 25
members. Mallaby commented that:-

“Time after time, Western
publics raised on stories of World Bank white elephants believe them.
Lawmakers in European parliaments and the U.S. Congress accept NGO
arguments at face value, and the government officials who sit on the
World Bank's board respond by blocking funding for deserving projects.”

There
was a bitter exchange between Mallaby, the journalist who told the
story and the California based International Rivers Network over the
details. But a few years ago, when I visited the site where the Bujagali
dam was finally being built, it was evident that just a handful of
people had been affected. The reservoir is small, covering less than 400
hectares (including the original course of the river) since water is
stored in the vast Lake Victoria. Aside from the foreign-owned white
water rafting company which had to relocate, the main complaints were
the inconvenience caused by the construction and the fact that not
enough locals were being employed.

But the cost of delay can be
documented. Electricity shortages and high energy prices were identified
by the International Monetary Fund as a major drain on the economy. The
resulting increase in unemployment and poverty has been measured; the
increase in infant mortality caused by increased poverty is well
documented. The available data suggests that perhaps 10,000 children
died as a result of the delayed electricity project.

But Uganda
is by no means the only place in Africa where countries have been
prevented from using cheap, reliable and renewable hydroelectricity.
Closer to home, the Zambezi River could be producing 10,000Megawatts
more than is already generated at Cabora Bassa and Kariba. That could be
supplying the regional power pool from which South Africa would also
have benefited. But that capacity was not developed when it was needed.

The
donors, on whom countries like Mozambique and Zambia depend, would
simply not allow aid money to be spent on planning and developing water
infrastructure projects. In the early 2000s, I sat through one
particularly ill-tempered meeting in Europe where African water
Ministers said that they needed funding to prepare infrastructure
projects and their European counterparts simply refused to put that on
the agenda for discussion. They wanted to talk conservation.

At
the root of this conflict is a family of environmental NGOs that has
been remarkably effective at stifling Africa’s hydropower development
proposals even as they fail abjectly to influence their home countries’
environmental and climate change policies. The Germans, amongst the most
vocal opponents of dam development, have increased their use of coal
for electricity generation over the past few years even as they lecture
Africans about the need to reduce CO2 emissions and prepare for climate
change.

But the NGOs have targeted the World Bank and the wider
family of regional development banks because they are gatekeepers for
funds to poor countries. Even if they don’t lend all the money needed
for projects, their involvement gives comfort to other financiers who
don’t have the capacity to evaluate projects.

South African born
John Briscoe, former Chief Water Advisor to the World Bank has
documented the consequences of the attack on the Bank for investment in
water:

“… poor developing countries without choices had to deal
with the enormous transaction costs and processes which piled up in the
Bank. ‘I am ashamed to even come here’ said President Museveni of
Uganda, when he thought he was inaugurating the Bujagali dam in 2002. ‘I
am not happy because a project that should have taken two years has
taken seven years to start. All this hullabaloo has been a waste of time
and a lack of seriousness... this was a circus’ (Reuters, 2002) (little
knowing that the process would take another six years before the
project was to be actually approved!).

In short, there was an
impasse between the urgent needs for financing of infrastructure in poor
countries, on the one hand, and an ever-more skittish set of
institutions (with the World Bank, the iconic institution) unable and
unwilling to make capital available for reasonable projects which should
be built. Bank lending for hydropower fell by 90% in the 1990s.

Briscoe
documented how the US government worked, back then, to ensure that its
positions were adopted by an institution where decision-making is,
nominally, the responsibility of its 180 country members. In the formal
meetings of the Bank’s directors,

“… the rich countries did not
contradict the views of the developing countries but did their talking
in other ways. Immediately after one of these sessions the phone rang in
the office of my Vice President. It was the US Executive Director who,
uncharacteristically, had not said a word during the discussion. ‘If
this is the position taken by the Bank, then you should know that it
will be very difficult for the US to support the next round of IDA’. IDA
is the concessionary tail which wags the hard-lending dog in the World
Bank.“

More recently, it appeared that this approach was history.
The World Bank reviewed its water policies and recognized that if they
did not invest in water infrastructure, they would be failing in their
job as a development bank. They recognized that hydropower, which uses
the solar energy that drives the hydrological cycle, is an excellent way
of producing cheap, reliable low-carbon energy. They also acknowledged
that storing water in infrastructure like dams was important to allow
poor countries to ensure reliable supplies of the water that they need
for their development despite their unpredictable and variable climates.

The
example of South Africa is frequently cited. Were it not for the dams
that augment the Vaal’s flow during dry seasons, Gauteng and its
surrounds would have just one tenth of the current water supply reliably
available. The economy would close down and the majority of Gauteng’s
people – who consume most of the stored water – would have to move
elsewhere. But while South Africa has dams in which it can store
approximately 600 tonnes of water per person, the figure in many
sub-Saharan African countries is closer to 60 tonnes. Meanwhile,
the USA stores over 6000 tonnes of water per person.

But Patrick
Leahy, the Democrat from Vermont, first elected in 1974 and now his
country’s longest-serving senator, has decided that he does not want to
allow African countries to enjoy the benefits that he already has. He
introduced a clause into the 2014 US budget, now passed into law, that
instructs the World Bank (and the wider family of regional development
banks in Africa, Asia and Latin America) not to allow Africans to build
dams. He can do this because he is chairman of the foreign affairs sub
committee of the Appropriation Committee, which draws up the US budget
and sets conditions for its use. Although in June last year, President
Obama had promised to help bring Power to Africa, his Vermont Senator
had other ideas. The clause he introduced into the law stated
clearly that:

“The Secretary of the Treasury shall instruct the
United States executive director of each international financial
institution that it is the policy of the United States to oppose any
loan, grant, strategy or policy of such institution to support the
construction of any large hydroelectric dam.” (Section 7060(c)(7)(D).)

So
why should a good guy like this introduce into US budget legislation a
provision that will keep poor people in poverty and stall African
development? The answer, it would appear, is that he has to keep
his environmental constituency sweet. And he doesn’t have to worry about
offending black voters, who might raise African concerns. The 2010
census found only 6277 African-Americans in Vermont, just 1% of the
population. This is presumably why he was also able to help pass an
agriculture Bill that made significant cuts to the food stamp programmes
on which many poor - disproportionately black - Americans, depend. And
Senator Leahy clearly worries even less about the feelings of the
millions of people in Africa and Asia on whom he imposes his views. He
certainly does not account to them.

The fact that most of
Vermont’s electricity comes from the kind of large dams he opposes
elsewhere just passes him by. He is comfortable to abuse the US
Treasury to carry instructions into the World Bank that override any
internal analysis. His instructions will overrule the Treasury’s own
staff let alone the World Bank and its members, simply to please his
lobby group.

He can do this because the Banks work on a “one
dollar, one vote” system that allows richer shareholder countries to
veto policy and projects that they don’t like, regardless of the quality
of the proposals. Yet Leahy knows that his own country’s aid programmes
are seriously flawed. In 2012, he told the heads of his government’s
USAID programme that,

“I have long voiced my concerns with the
way a few large U.S. contractors and NGOs obtain the vast majority of
USAID funding. Years ago I created the Development Grants Program, a
small fund to support innovative proposals of small, mostly local NGOs.
But USAID has done what it does too often – take a good idea and either
fail to implement it or redesign it in such a way as to thwart the
original intent.

“I hope you can tell us what you expect from the
changes to USAID’s procurement process, because they need to
fundamentally reform the way USAID does business. If these changes just
end up shifting resources to big contractors in developing countries
that is not the reform we seek.”

In 2007 I met a group of US
Congressmen, the HELP commission, who were on a round-Africa junket to
find ways to make their foreign assistance more effective. I asked
whether they could they pool their resources with other donors - “SWAPs”
– sector wide approaches are widely used to help both donors and
recipients use external assistance more effectively. That would be a
step too far they said, their big contractor lobbies were simply too
powerful to fight.

The consequence was seen in another attempt to
make US aid work more effectively. The Millennium Challenge Programme
tried to go beyond normal USAID pork barrel process of appointing an
American main contractor, who would then often appoint an American
sub-contractor and then a local contractor (who would do all the work).
But in Mozambique, they could only fund just over half of their intended
projects, because their bureaucratic procedures added so much to the
costs.

Yet the Help Commission report highlighted that a
Principle underlying American aid should be that it “Supports the
promotion of democratic principles and recognize that good governance
and accountable leaders advance development.”

Accountability, like charity, it seems, should start at home but doesn’t go much further.

So,
one reason that Leahy’s intervention was approved may lie in the fine
print of the Power Africa proposals. The problem with the World Bank is
that it insists on (relatively) objective tender procedures, under which
companies from countries like China, Korea and India regularly wipe the
floor with American competition. Power Africa will not allow such
indignities. It will rather use traditional US institutions to extract
as much business for themselves as they give help to poor countries.

This
is where the BRICS and their bank comes in. A decade ago, the World
Bank and its regional family were the only game in town. If poor
countries could not get their support, they could not build dams. So
many countries, faced like Uganda with power shortages, ended up burning
dirty coal or expensive diesel to try and keep up with growing demand
for electricity. Hydropower was simply off the agenda.

Then China
got in on the act. As their trade with Africa and other developing
regions has expanded, they have offered attractive deals to pay for the
minerals and other goods that they are exporting. And, while this has
been viewed with suspicion by many – particularly western –
commentators, the basic rule is that China is willing to provide what it
is asked for.

Help with dams is one area where they can offer
obvious value. Over the past couple of decades, China has built hundreds
of large dams to provide water for its cities and agriculture, for
flood protection and to generate clean electricity – a high priority as
the ongoing Beijing smog crisis is showing us. So, in their discussions
with African and Asian countries, they offered to support dam building
projects for hydropower as well as water supply and irrigation.

The
response has been remarkable. According to the International Rivers
Network, the leading anti-dam NGO (located, bizarrely, in California,
whose economy would collapse without water from large dams) China is now
financing and building over large 15 dams in 8 African countries and
there are more to come. Chinese companies are also building projects
financed by other parties as in Lesotho, where Sino Hydro, China’s
leading dam construction company, won the billion rand contract to build
the Metolong dam to supply Maseru, with finance from Middle East
Development Funds. Brazil and India, also capable dam builders, are
following suit. Because alternative sources of funding are now
available, the World Bank’s effective ban on water infrastructure has
just opened up the market to other players.

So this is another
piece in the puzzle about Senator Leahy. People who think he is a nice
guy will say that he is just starting a conversation about social and
environmental protection in developing countries. But that is not
how it will be seen in Africa and Asia. Says John Briscoe:

“it
reinforces a prevalent view that US policy towards the developing world
is driven by politicians who are driven by extreme single-issue groups
at home, and give little attention to the proven instruments – including
infrastructure – which lead to growth and poverty reduction.”

The outcome is already clear:

“Africans
and others are turning and will turn, with great appreciation, to the
governments and companies of China and Brazil and potentially to a BRICs
Bank, who understand that electricity is one of the keys to a better
life, and who will help Africans build the infrastructure they need for
economic growth and poverty reduction.”

SENATOR Ron Boswell has attacked the power of environmentalists to damage the prosperity of regional communities.

In
a speech in the Senate today, Senator Boswell warned cattle producers
to closely examine a campaign to force them to prove their environmental
sustainability.

“The apparent growing power of environmental
non-government organisations and corporations raises fundamental
questions about the future role of government, science and rational
resource management in Australian primary production,” he said.

Senator
Boswell foreshadowed a Senate inquiry to examine the implications of an
international campaign to develop sustainability criteria for beef
production.

“This goes to the very essence of not simply who is
running the Australian beef industry but who is running the country,”
Senator Boswell said.

“Who determines how our primary industries
are managed and how they are administered? Who decides how our resources
are utilised and where they are marketed? Who determines the prosperity
of our communities, our industries and our nation? Those are questions
that must be answered.

“I believe this issue should be referred
to the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and
Transport. Before I do that, I will discuss this further with my
colleague, Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce.”

Senator Boswell
said indications were that meeting basic sustainability criteria could
cost Australia’s 77,000 cattle properties some $135 million in fees in
the first year.

“I do not want to see Australian farming families
burdened with more cost and more paperwork and more unnecessary
environmental obligations to keep WWF in business and provide a
marketing point-of-difference for the likes of McDonald’s,” he said.

Senator Boswell was referring to the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (GRSB), established by WWF and McDonald’s.

“On
March 17, the GRSB published a document called the ‘Draft Principles
and Criteria for Global Sustainable Beef’, which potentially could shape
how Australian cattle producers are allowed to operate in years to
come.

“We can call witnesses to the inquiry from the main
players. We can thoroughly examine who will bear the cost of this
sustainability scheme and who will enjoy the benefits.

“We can
investigate what the implications are for rural and regional communities
that depend on cattle and other primary production. Also the
implications for Australia’s trade sovereignty and its ability to freely
trade in primary products, products we already know to be sustainable.”

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

27 March, 2014

Climate change: the debate is about to change radically

As
many Warmists now acknowledge, there is no point in trying to stop
global warming; all we can do is adapt to whatever arises

The
latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) is due out next week. If the leaked draft is reflected in the
published report, it will constitute the formal moving on of the debate
from the past, futile focus upon "mitigation" to a new debate about
resilience and adaptation.

The new report will apparently tell us
that the global GDP costs of an expected global average temperature
increase of 2.5 degrees Celsius over the 21st century will be
between 0.2 and 2 per cent. To place that in context, the well-known
Stern Review of 2006 estimated the costs as 5-20 per cent of GDP. Stern
estimates the costs of his recommended policies for mitigating climate
change at 2 per cent of GDP – and his estimates are widely regarded as
relatively optimistic (others estimate mitigation costs as high as 10
per cent of global GDP). Achieving material mitigation, at a cost of 2
per cent and more of global GDP, would require international
co-ordination that we have known since the failure of the Copenhagen
conference on climate change simply was not going to happen. Even if it
did happen, and were conducted optimally, it would mitigate only a
fraction of the total rise, and might create its own risks.

And
to add to all this, now we are told that the cost might be as low as 0.2
per cent of GDP. At a 2.4 per cent annual GDP growth rate, the global
economy increases 0.2 per cent every month.

So the mitigation
deal has become this: Accept enormous inconvenience, placing
authoritarian control into the hands of global agencies, at huge costs
that in some cases exceed 17 times the benefits even on the Government's
own evaluation criteria, with a global cost of 2 per cent of GDP at the
low end and the risk that the cost will be vastly greater, and do all
of this for an entire century, and then maybe – just maybe – we might
save between one and ten months of global GDP growth.

Can anyone
seriously claim, with a straight face, that that should be regarded as
an attractive deal or that the public is suffering from a psychological
disorder if it resists mitigation policies?

The 2014 Budget
recognised reality, with the Government now introducing special measures
to keep energy prices low for energy intensive firms – abandoning what
little pretence remained that it was attempting to prevent climate
change by limiting energy use so as to limit CO2 emissions. The new IPCC
report – though it remains as robust as ever in saying that there will
be climate change and its effects will be material (points that
relatively few mitigation policy sceptics deny) – has a marked change of
focus from the 2007 report.

Whereas previously the IPCC
emphasised the effects climate change could have if not prevented, now
the focus has moved on to how to make economies and societies resilient
and to adapt to warming now considered inevitable. Climate
exceptionalism – the notion that climate change is a challenge of a
different order from, say, recessions or social inclusion or female
education or many other important global policy goals – is to be down
played. Instead, the new report emphasised that adapting to climate
change is one of many challenges that policymakers will face but should
have its proper place alongside other policies.

Quite so. It has
been known since the late 1970s that there would be material warming
during the 21st century and we will need to adapt to it. At present,
though, in the UK we still carry the legacy of a panoply of enormously
expensive but futile policies that were designed to be pieces of a
global effort to mitigate that is just not going to happen.

Our
first step in adapting to climate change should be to accept that we
aren't going to mitigate it. We're going to have to adapt. That doesn't
mean there might not be the odd mitigation-type policy, around the
edges, that is cheap and feasible and worthwhile. But it does mean that
the grandiloquent schemes for preventing climate change should go. Their
day is done. Even the IPCC – albeit implicitly – sees that now.

Do Skeptics ‘Reposition’ Warming as ‘Theory’ or Do Alarmists ‘Reposition’ Fear as ‘Fact’? Revisiting an Urban Legend

How
many times have you heard climate activists claim skeptics are just
latter-day “tobacco scientists?” Google “tobacco scientists” and “global
warming,” and you’ll get about 1,110,000 results. With so much (ahem)
smoke, surely there must be some fire, right?

The
misconception that there is serious disagreement among scientists about
global warming is actually an illusion that has been deliberately
fostered by a relatively small but extremely well-funded cadre of
special interests, including Exxon Mobil and a few other oil, coal, and
utilities companies. These companies want to prevent any new policies
that would interfere with their current business plans that rely on the
massive unrestrained dumping of global warming pollution into the
Earth’s atmosphere every hour of every day.

One of the internal
memos prepared by this group to guide the employees they hired to run
their disinformation campaign was discovered by the Pulitzer
Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan. Here was the group’s stated
objective: to “reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.”

This
technique has been used before. The tobacco industry, 40 years ago,
reacted to the historic Surgeon General’s report linking cigarette
smoking to lung cancer and other lung diseases by organizing a similar
disinformation campaign.

One of their memos, prepared in the
1960s, was recently uncovered during one of the lawsuits against the
tobacco companies in behalf of the millions of people who have been
killed by their product. It is interesting to read it 40 years later in
the context of the global warming campaign:

“Doubt is our
product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’
that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of
establishing controversy.” Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company memo,
1960s

There’s just one problem with this tale of corruption and
intrigue — much of it is false and all of it is misleading. Let’s
examine the flaws in this urban legend, going from minor to major.

First,
Gore’s alleged source, Ross Gelbspan, is not a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Gelbspan’s 1997 book, The Heat Is On, supposedly exposes how fossil fuel
companies and conservative politicians collude to ”confuse the public
about global warming.” The jacket of the book describes Gelbspan as a
“Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist.” But former JunkScience.Com blogger
Steve Milloy searched the list of Pulitzer journalists, and found that
Gelbspan was not among them. Gelbspan later claimed only to have
conceived, directed, and edited a series of articles that won a Pulitzer
in 1984.

Second, Gelbspan was not the source of Gore’s story.
Gore discussed the leaked documents in his 1992 book, Earth in the
Balance (p. 360), which was published five years before Gelbspan’s book.
So how did Gore find out about it? Blogger Russell Cook notes that the
documents were first “reported in a 1991 New York Times article which
claimed they came from an unnamed source at the Sierra Club.”

Why
did Gore credit Gelbspan with breaking the story? Who knows! Maybe
because information sourced to “Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter” sounds
credible even if the reporter neither won a Pulitzer nor broke the
story.

Third, Gore gives the false impression that ExxonMobil and
other oil companies were part of the “group” behind the “disinformation
campaign” supposedly revealed in the memo that Gelbspan supposedly
“discovered.”

The memo was one of several documents drafted by an
ad hoc group calling itself Information Council for the Environment.
ICE was a project of Southern Company (an electric utility) and Western
Fuels Association (a non-profit supply cooperative of consumer-owned
electric utilities). No oil companies were involved.

Fourth, the
documents are not an adopted plan to ”reposition” global warming but a
proposal to “test market” the effectiveness of such messaging.

The actual objectives of the project were to:

1)
Demonstrate that a consumer-based media awareness program can
positively change the opinions of a selected population regarding the
validity of global warming.

2) Begin to develop a message and strategy for shaping public opinion on a national scale.

3) Lay the solid groundwork for a unified national electric industry voice on global warming.

The
plan was never developed, much less implemented. As the 1991 New York
Times article reported, different members of the electric utility
industry took different positions on climate change:

The utility
industry is divided on the question of global warming. Two California
utilities, Southern California Edison, the nation’s second-largest
utility after the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, and the Los Angeles
Water and Power Department, the largest municipal company, volunteered
in May to cut their carbon-dioxide emissions by 20 percent in the next
20 years. Most of the savings, they said, would come from efficiency
improvements in lighting, motors and cooling that would pay for
themselves.

The Arizona Public Service Company, which serves
Flagstaff, declined an invitation to participate in ICE. Mark De
Michele, president and chief executive, did not reply to repeated phone
calls seeking comment. But he told The Arizona Daily Sun in May, “The
subject matter is far too complex and could be far more severe than the
ads make of it for the subject to be dealt with in a slick ad campaign.”

The
Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade group based in Washington
that also helped organize the ICE campaign, takes the position that
because of the possibility that climate change is a real threat, steps
should be taken to cut carbon-dioxide output if those steps are
justifiable for other reasons — for example, saving money through higher
efficiency or reducing the output of sulfur dioxide from power plants.
That chemical causes acid rain.

Some of the advertising messages
test-marketed in Flagstaff, Ariz., Bowling Green, Ky., and Fargo, N.D.,
were goofy. From the Times article:

In Bowling Green, an ad
showed a cartoon horse in earmuffs and scarf and said, “If the Earth is
getting warmer, why is Kentucky getting colder?” Another, with a cartoon
man bundled up and holding a snow shovel, appeared in Minnesota and
substituted “Minneapolis” for “Kentucky.”

Did any skeptical
scientists endorse those messages? No. As the Times reported, Patrick
Michaels, Robert Balling, and Sherwood Idso, the ICE science advisory
panel, ”said in telephone interviews that the salient element in two of
the ads, that some areas might be getting cooler, did not contradict the
theory of global warming.” The article also reported that Balling and
Michaels “have both asked to have their names removed from future
mailings.”

Indeed, as Gelbspan acknowledged in his book,
“Michaels has insisted that he dissociated himself from the ICE campaign
when he learned of what he called its ‘blatant dishonesty.’” When
Balling and Michaels pulled out, the ICE project collapsed. So much for
the grand fossil-fueled conspiracy.

Fifth, there is no shame in
repositioning as theory that which is not fact.* The “repositioning”
memo is dated May 15, 1991 — four and a half years before the IPCC
famously concluded, in November 1995, that the ”balance of evidence
suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.”
Note too that the IPCC’s iconic formulation is not an assertion of what
is demonstrably true, only an assessment of what the “balance of
evidence” “suggests.”

From 1979 to 1991, two of the three main
data sources — satellites and radiosondes (weather balloons) — showed no
warming or even a slight cooling trend in the bulk atmosphere
(troposphere). It was the land record that was the odd man out. Given
that radiosondes were calibrated to measure global temperature and the
satellites were specifically designed for that purpose, while the
surface network was designed to measure agricultural weather, which
should objective scientists trust least?

In 1998, the Remote
System Sensing (RSS) team led by Frank Wentz discovered an orbital
decay-induced spurious cooling in the University of Alabama-Huntsville
(UAH) satellite record. The UAH scientists corrected their record, the
balloon record was also revised, so all three records showed a warming
trend. Only at that point did global (as distinct from urban or local)
warming become a “fact” — a trend confirmed by multiple independent
observations. But then, irony of ironies, global warming plateaued in
the RSS record, and “the pause” has persisted for 17 and a half years.

Even today, calling anthropogenic global warming a ”fact” – meaning conclusively demonstrated – would still be an exaggeration.

A
study published last year by Benjamin Santer and colleagues in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, alluding to the IPCC’s
iconic attribution statement, proudly proclaimed “clear evidence for a
discernible human influence on the thermal structure of the atmosphere.”
Since 1979, the middle atmosphere has warmed (albeit less than
predicted) while the stratosphere has cooled. This observed pattern
matches the model-predicted vertical structure (“fingerprint”) of
anthropogenic climate change.

Why is that evidence of
anthropogenic warming? If the Sun were responsible for global warming,
the stratosphere should also get warmer. But if warming is due to rising
greenhouse gas concentrations in the troposphere, then the stratosphere
should cool because more upwelling heat is trapped in the layer beneath
it.

Santer et al., however, chose their words carefully —
perhaps artfully. A “discernible human influence” can include the
cooling effects of manufactured substances, chiefly hydroflourocarbons,
that destroy ozone in the troposphere. Ozone is itself a greenhouse
(heat absorbing) gas. So some significant part of stratospheric cooling
could be due to ozone depletion rather than to greenhouse gas emissions
trapping more heat in the troposphere. A study cited by the Santer team,
led by one of its co-authors, acknowledges that possibility:

In
the mid and upper stratosphere the simulated natural and combined
anthropogenic responses are detectable and consistent with observations,
but the influences of greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting substances
could not be separately detected in our analysis.

Sixth, when
read in context, “reposition as theory, rather than fact” refers not to
anthropogenic warming per se but to the prediction “that higher levels
of carbon dioxide will bring a catastrophic global warming.” For
example, an ICE document quotes then University of Virginia
climatologist Patrick Michaels: “I am one of many scientists who believe
the vision of catastrophic global warming is distorted.”

The key
climate science question for policymakers and citizens is not whether
anthropogenic global warming is real but whether, in Al Gore’s words,
climate change is “a planetary emergency — a crisis that threatens the
survival of civilization and the habitability of the Earth.” The climate
alarm narrative was not a “fact” in 1991 and certainly is not today.

Mounting
evidence indicates that the climate is substantially less sensitive
(reactive) to greenhouse gas emissions than “consensus” science had
assumed. The oft-asserted link between warming and extreme weather
continues to elude researchers. More importantly, the climate trilogy of
terror – ocean circulation collapse, rapid ice sheet disintegration,
and runaway climate change (the methane “bomb”) – has far less
scientific plausibility today than it did in 1991.**

Gore and
other climate campaigners have been trying for decades to reposition
fear as fact. Their j’accuse directed at skeptics is Orwellian.

There
is no natural phenomenon these days that is not somehow linked to a
(non)warming world. Slate's Eric Holthaus wasted no time blaming the
recent devastating mudslide in Oso, Washington, on the side effects of
global warming. “One of the most well-forecast and consequential
components of human-caused climate change is the tendency for rainstorms
to become more intense as the planet warms,” he writes. “As the effect
becomes more pronounced, that will make follow-on events like flooding
and landslides more common. But we don't have to wait for the future.
This is already happening.” Yet according to the Associated Press, “A
scientist working for the government had warned 15 years ago about the
potential for a catastrophic landslide in the fishing village where the
collapse of a rain-soaked hillside over the weekend killed at least 14
people and left scores missing.” Holthaus admits in the same article
that the “disaster occurred in an area known for its landslides.” But
like all alarmists, he just couldn't resist provoking the debate.

Britain
has a "duty" to embrace fracking in the wake of the Ukraine crisis,
David Cameron has said, as he accused opponents of shale gas exploration
of not "understanding" the issue properly.

The Prime Minister
said that Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea should be a "wake up
call" and that European countries must become less reliant on Russian
gas.

There is growing concern that European leaders are unable to
put sufficient pressure on Mr Putin over the crisis in Ukraine because
they are so dependent on Russia for energy supplies.

Asked
whether it is now "our duty to ensure that we are more energy
independent by embracing fracking", the Prime Minister said: "Yes I
think it is. Something positive should come out of this for Europe which
is to take a long hard look at its energy resilience, and its energy
independence."

"Britain is not reliant on Russian gas to any
extent, it's a few percentage points of our gas intake," Mr Cameron
said. "But the variety around Europe is very, very wide. Some countries
are almost 100 per cent reliant on Russian gas so I think it is
something of a wake up call and I think action will be taken."

Fracking,
which involves fracturing rocks deep underground with water and
chemicals to extract natural gas, has dramatically cut energy bills in
the USA.

Ministers are hoping that it could do the same in the UK. However, the process led to protests last year in West Sussex.

Barack
Obama this week used a summit in the Netherlands to press Mr Cameron
and other European Union leaders to impose tougher sanctions on Russia
over Mr Putin's aggression in Ukraine.

Officials believe that Britain can learn from the speed with which America has embraced fracking.

Mr
Cameron said: "Why has it taken so long in the UK and Europe as
compared to the US? We can ponder that or alternatively we can just do
what this Government is doing which is to roll up the sleeves, simplify
the process, make the permissions easier, getting on with some wells
moving."

However, in comments that risk angering opponents of
fracking, Mr Cameron said that there is a "lack of understanding" about
how shale gas exploration works.

"A lot of people think that the
process of fracturing shale goes forever and ever rather than having a
process and then you release the gas and then you take the gas off," Mr
Cameron said.

"There's a lack of understanding about the nature
of what actually happens and how much it has in common with the ways
that we extract gas in the world today."

He added: "When I look
at a lot of the concerns expressed, I think a lot of them are based on
concerns and people worrying about things but I think when you actually
look at them all and go through at all the issues, I think there's a
really good answer to all the questions. "

He said that there will be some shale gas wells "up and running" in the UK by the end of this year.

A
study backed by the British Geological Survey this week warned that
shale gas exploration could be dangerous and lead to water contamination
because wells may leak underground.

Speaker
John Boehner (R-Ohio) is ramping up pressure on President Obama to
fast-track natural-gas exports to reduce Europe's dependence on Russia.

During
a briefing with Republican leadership on Tuesday, Boehner hit the
administration and Senate Democrats for opposing "common-sense
measures."

"President Obama is in Europe today. I hope he uses
this as an opportunity to discuss how we can help the Europeans reduce
their dependence on Vladimir Putin," Boehner said.

"Expediting
the approval of U.S. natural-gas exports would send a clear signal that
Russia’s energy stranglehold on Europe will not continue. And just as
important, it would create more American jobs and help more Americans as
they face the squeeze of not enough jobs and not enough increase in
wages," he added.

Republicans aren't backing down on natural-gas exports, and have found some allies in a few Senate Democrats.

Sens.
Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) both affirmed their
support of sending more liquefied natural gas overseas during Landrieu's
first hearing as chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources
Committee on Tuesday.

The
following has been excerpted from Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in
the 21st Century will be Nasty, Brutish, and Short by David Archibald:

The
United States is needlessly penalizing itself and squandering its
resource endowment, all because of the big lie that carbon dioxide is
causing dangerous global warming. The Chinese, in contrast, merely pay
lip service to that big lie. The only reason they are making a token
effort on the “global warming” front is to encourage Western countries
to continue hobbling their own economies. One can be forgiven for
thinking that there must be some truth in the global warming notion
given how much noise its advocates have made. But as with most causes
promoted by leftist ideologues, the truth is exactly the opposite to
their claim. The fact of the matter is the carbon dioxide level of the
atmosphere remains dangerously low at four hundred parts per million. In
fact the more carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the better for
all forms of life on planet Earth.

Before the Industrial
Revolution, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stood at 286 parts per
million. Let us round this number to 300 parts per million to make the
sums easier. Naturally occurring greenhouse gases ensure that the planet
is 30°C warmer than it would otherwise be if they were not in the
atmosphere, so the average temperature of the planet’s surface is 15°C
instead of -15°C. Water vapor is responsible for 80 percent of that
effect, and carbon dioxide for only 10 percent, with methane, ozone, and
so forth accounting for the remainder. So the approximately 300 parts
per million of carbon dioxide is good for 3°C degrees of warming. If the
relationship between carbon dioxide concentration and temperature were
arithmetic—in other words, a straight linear relationship—then adding
another 100 parts per million of carbon dioxide would result in one
degree of warming. We are adding 2 parts per million to the atmosphere
annually, or 100 parts per million every fifty years. At that rate,
humanity would fry.

Thankfully, the relationship between
atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature is logarithmic, not
arithmetic. The first 20 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere provides 1.6°C of warming, after which the effect drops away
rapidly. From the current level of 400 parts per million, each addition
of 100 parts per million adds only 0.1°C of warming. By the time we have
dug up all the rocks we can economically burn, and burned them, we may
reach 600 parts per million in the atmosphere. So perhaps we might add
another 0.2°C of warming over the next two centuries. That warming will
be lost in the noise of natural climate variation. So much for the
problem of global warming! As a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is
tuckered out. On the positive side of the ledger, it is very beneficial
as aerial fertilizer. The carbon dioxide that mankind has put into the
atmosphere to date has in fact boosted crop yields by 15 percent. This
is like giving the Third World countries free phosphate fertilizer. Who
could possibly be so heartless as to deny under- developed countries
that benefit, at no cost to anyone?

The real threat is
dangerously low levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The Earth
has been in a glacial period for the last 3 million years, including
some sixty separate glacial advances and retreats. The current Holocene
interglacial period might last up to another 3,000 years before the
Earth plunges into another glaciation. Carbon dioxide is a gas highly
soluble in water, and its solubility is highly temperature dependent.
The colder the planet is, the more carbon dioxide the oceans absorb.
During glaciations the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere has fallen
to as low at 180 parts per million. It needs to be stressed that plant
life shuts down at 150 parts per million, as plants are unable to
operate with the partial pressure differential of carbon dioxide between
their cells and the atmosphere. Several times during the last 3 million
years, life above sea level was within 30 parts per million of being
extinguished by a lack of carbon dioxide. The flowering plants we rely
upon in our diet evolved 100 million years ago when the carbon dioxide
level was four times the current concentration. For plant life, the
current amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is near starvation
levels

And unfortunately, the carbon dioxide that human beings
are pumping into the atmosphere will not be there for very long. There
is fifty times as much carbon dioxide held by the oceans as there is in
the atmosphere. As the deep oceans turn over, on an eight-hundred-year
cycle of circulation, they will take the carbon dioxide now in the
atmosphere down into Davy Jones’s Locker, where it will be of no use to
man, beast, or plant life. Agricultural productivity will rise for the
next two centuries or so, along with the atmospheric carbon dioxide
level, after which it will fall away. By the year 3000 AD, the
atmosphere’s carbon dioxide level will be only a couple of percent
higher than before the Industrial Revolution. Life above sea level will
therefore remain dangerously pre- carious because of the low carbon
dioxide level.

“Global warming” is an irrational belief whose
proponents demonstrate no interest in examining scientific evidence that
may prove their beliefs incorrect. As a simple cult, it has failed to
progress much beyond the concept of original sin, apocalyptic visions,
sumptuary laws, and the selling of indulgences. Wind farms are the
temples of this state-sponsored belief system. This cult doesn’t extend
to building aged-care homes, hospitals, or anything much for the common
good. Instead it degrades the fabric of society by misdirecting human
effort. Its true believers can hardly be blamed; the global warming cult
is not much different from any of the other end-of-the-world cults that
have preceded it. Society’s opprobrium should be saved for the
gatekeepers who have failed in their duty to protect the public from the
depredations of the global warming rent-seekers and charlatans. The
boards and executive staffs of a number of learned societies across the
Western world have embraced this cult against the wishes of the majority
of their members…idso positive CO2

The fact that the world has
not warmed since 1998 (in defiance of the global warming scare) hasn’t
dented cult members’ faith. Arguing scientific evidence with them is
pointless. It will take something far worse than a return of the frigid
winters of the 1970s to create doubt in their minds. That something
worse is coming. Millions of people may have to endure many harsh years
before this pernicious cult is vanquished. And until the global warming
myth is exploded, the security of the United States—and thus of the
world—is also at risk.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

26 March, 2014

NEW BOOK "To Kill an Error" - A novel approach to Global Warming Scepticism

by Jed B van de Poll

Kindle Price: US$6.68

"To
Kill an Error" is a fictional account of the furore surrounding the
2010 accusations of data manipulation associated with the world's
temperature record.

While Al Gore's book 'An Inconvenient Truth'
was a factual book based on fiction, 'To Kill an Error' is a fictional
book based on fact.

The story is a fast-paced thriller of
corporate greed and intrigue on an international scale that will keep
you on the edge of your seat as you learn some uncomfortable truths
about climate change, the environmental industry and the real cost of
being 'green'.

Nature
Climate Change recently published a paper that contends that temperate
zones will see reduced crop yields by 2030, presumably plunging the
world into a man-caused famine not seen since the last time communists
were in charge.

From Blue and Green Tomorrow:

“As more
data have become available, we’ve seen a shift in consensus, telling us
that the impacts of climate change in temperate regions will happen
sooner rather than later,” said Professor Andy Challinor, lead author of
the study.

Yes, any time I see the word “consensus” in the
context of the "settled science" of global something I break out into a
cold sweat, I hyperventilate and my sight grows dim.

And that should happen to you too.

Because I next wonder: “How much is this going to cost me exactly?”

But
then I remember, upon studied reflection, that every time the
WeatherNazis come to a consensus about anything they’re as wrong Hitler
was in invading Russia without winter clothing.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “It’s gonna be a lot warmer than people think.”

Certainly, it’s a lot warmer for him now.

For
the estimated $100 billion annually that we will be spending on
“climate change” programs by 2020, I’m thinking that there might be a
better way to spend that money, like terraforming Mars for human
population or throwing a really big Fourth of July Parade.

These
are certainly better ideas than the rationing of electricity, wearing
clothes made exclusively of hemp and dating chicks with hairy armpits.

Or driving a Chevy Volt.

But the news gets worse for liberals.

The indoor hemp industry apparently produces the same amount of carbon in the atmosphere as 3 million cars.

“'[I]ndoor
Cannabis production uses 1% of the nation’s entire electricity
consumption,' reports Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researcher
Evan Mills in the Huffington Post. 'This comes to energy expenditures of
$5 billion per year.' While 1% may not seem like a lot, the report
claims that smoking one single Cannabis joint is equivalent to running a
100-watt light bulb for 17 hours. That Cannabis cigarette carries two
pounds of CO2 emissions."

I don't know what a gram of dope costs these days, but that's a lot of carbon for a gram.

While
the doomsday date for the final destruction of mankind due to global
warming gets pushed back farther and farther, I’m wondering if any of
these WeatherNazis actually understand human history.

It would be wonderful if human activity could warm the planet.

The danger to civilization isn’t a warm planet, but a cold one.

It
was only with the retreat of the last Ice Age that the ascendancy of
modern man took hold. Without that, we’d all be living in caves, each of
us ineligible to be president of the United States because we’d all
still live in Kenya.

Instead we live in the house of cards that
the president of the United States built—who by the way was born in
Hawaii, a place much warmer than most of the globe; and presumably what
Montana will be a lot like in the global something future.

Weather does influence culture, but not in the ways the alarmists would have you believe.

A
new study by Matthew Ranson—no relation (my relatives know how to
spell)—made possible by a fellowship from Harvard, predicts that because
of global warming crime will spike, with your daughters unsafe to roam
the streets day or night.

“The results show that temperature has a
strong positive effect on criminal behavior,” writes Ranson, “with
little evidence of lagged impacts. Between 2010 and 2099, climate change
will cause an additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 cases of rape, 1.2
million aggravated assaults, 2.3 million simple assaults, 260,000
robberies, 1.3 million burglaries, 2.2 million cases of larceny, and
580,000 cases of vehicle theft in the United States.”

See and all this time I thought that dinosaurs failed to adapt and thus became extinct.

I never knew it was dino-on-dino crime caused by high global temperatures.

And so reports like these send chills down my spine. Because believe me: It’ll cost us. One way or another, it’ll cost us.

New paper finds no effect of "acidification" on plankton from CO2 levels 8 times higher than today

A
paper published today in Biogeosciences finds that prior claims about
the effects of ocean "acidification" on calcifying plankton are highly
exaggerated because the artificial laboratory conditions utilized do not
correctly simulate the effects in natural seawater. The authors find
exposure of the plankton to "acidification" from elevated CO2
concentrations of up to 3247 ppm [over 8 times higher than the present]
had no effect on the life cycle (population density, growth and
reproduction) of calcifying plankton when natural buffering sediment was
present in the experiment.

The paper adds to several others
invalidating the vast prior literature on the effects of "acidification"
as overblown due to biased, artificial laboratory conditions [often
just putting sulfuric acid in an aquarium] that don't correctly simulate
the buffering effects of a natural environment.

Needless to say, the effects of increased CO2 on non-calcifying plankton are 100% positive due to CO2 fertilization.

Response of benthic foraminifera to ocean acidification in their natural sediment environment: a long-term culturing experiment

by K. Haynert et al.

Abstract.

Calcifying
foraminifera are expected to be endangered by ocean acidification;
however, the response of a complete community kept in natural sediment
and over multiple generations under controlled laboratory conditions has
not been constrained to date. During 6 months of incubation,
foraminiferal assemblages were kept and treated in natural sediment with
pCO2-enriched seawater of 430, 907, 1865 and 3247 ?atm pCO2. The fauna
was dominated by Ammonia aomoriensis and Elphidium species, whereas
agglutinated species were rare. After 6 months of incubation, pore water
alkalinity was much higher in comparison to the overlying seawater.
Consequently, the saturation state of ?calc was much higher in the
sediment than in the water column in nearly all pCO2 treatments and
remained close to saturation. As a result, the life cycle (population
density, growth and reproduction) of living assemblages varied markedly
during the experimental period, but was largely unaffected by the pCO2
treatments applied. According to the size–frequency distribution, we
conclude that foraminifera start reproduction at a diameter of 250 ?m.
Mortality of living Ammonia aomoriensis was unaffected, whereas size of
large and dead tests decreased with elevated pCO2 from 285 ?m (pCO2 from
430 to 1865 ?atm) to 258 ?m (pCO2 3247 ?atm). The total organic content
of living Ammonia aomoriensis has been determined to be 4.3% of CaCO3
weight. Living individuals had a calcium carbonate production rate of
0.47 g m?2 a?1, whereas dead empty tests accumulated a rate of 0.27 g
m?2 a?1. Although ?calc was close to 1, approximately 30% of the empty
tests of Ammonia aomoriensis showed dissolution features at high pCO2 of
3247 ?atm during the last 2 months of incubation. In contrast, tests of
the subdominant species, Elphidium incertum, stayed intact. Our results
emphasize that the sensitivity to ocean acidification of the
endobenthic foraminifera Ammonia aomoriensis in their natural sediment
habitat is much lower compared to the experimental response of specimens
isolated from the sediment.

New paper finds global sea level rise has decelerated 31% since 2002 along with the 'pause' of global warming

New paper attempts to explain the 'pause' in sea level rise

A
paper published today in Nature Climate Change finds that global sea
level rise has greatly decelerated 31% since 2002 from 3.5 mm/yr to 2.4
mm/yr. According to the authors, "This decreasing Global Mean Sea Level
[GMSL] rate coincides with the pause observed over the last decade in
the rate of Earth’s global mean surface temperature increase, an
observation exploited [very unscientific choice of words] by climate
sceptics to refute global warming and its attribution to a steadily
rising rate of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere." [Apparently, the
authors think that any skeptical scientist who points out an obvious
inconsistency between datasets is exploiting the observational data.]

This
observation, of course, is a crisis for CAGW alarmism and therefore
must be solved by a computer model. The authors simply create a
hydrological model programmed to say that the reason why sea levels have
decelerated is because it must be raining more over land due to ENSO
and therefore the land ate the 31% decrease in sea level rise [No
mention why ENSO also didn't cause more rain over the oceans]. The
authors admit there is no data to support land water stores prior to
GRACE since ~2003, therefore they just fabricate estimate the comparison
data for the period 1994-2002 of how much sea level rise was
ameliorated by land precipitation. Abracadabra, the land must have more
than eaten the sea level rise from AGW, allowing it to decelerate, and
the AGW "missing heat" is still very much alive somewhere in the ocean.

The
authors also find that even with this huge adjustment to sea level
rise, there is no evidence of acceleration over the past 20 years, which
means there is no evidence of a human influence on sea levels.

The
authors redeem themselves a bit in the conclusion and appear to
contradict their earlier statements in the paper: "Although progress has
been achieved and inconsistencies reduced, the puzzle of the missing
energy remains, raising the question of where the extra heat absorbed by
the Earth is going. The results presented here will further encourage
this debate as they underline the enigma between the observed plateau in
Earth’s mean surface temperature and continued rise in the Global Mean
Sea Level [GMSL]."

Climate science has sunk just like the
'missing heat' to the depths of the ocean trying to explain away the
"pause" of both global warming and global sea level rise, using
synthetic data generated by climate models that can be programmed to
obtain any result one desires.

New paper finds Arctic sea ice was much less than present-day during the Holocene Climate Optimum ~6,000 years ago

A
new paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews finds Arctic sea ice
extent and thickness was much less than present-day conditions during
the Holocene Climate Optimum from ~10,000-6,000 years ago. According to
the authors, "Arctic Ocean sea ice proxies generally suggest a reduction
in sea ice during parts of the early and middle Holocene (?6000–10,000
years Before the Present) compared to present day conditions."

The
authors show 8 different proxy studies reveal extended periods lasting
hundreds of years without perennial sea ice in the Arctic [ice-free
conditions], and find solar insolation explains these changes.

Arctic
Ocean sea ice proxies generally suggest a reduction in sea ice during
parts of the early and middle Holocene (?6000–10,000 years Before the
Present) compared to present day conditions. This sea ice minimum has
been attributed to the northern hemisphere Early Holocene Insolation
Maximum (EHIM) associated with Earth's orbital cycles. Here we
investigate the transient effect of insolation variations during the
final part of the last glaciation and the Holocene by means of
continuous climate simulations with the coupled atmosphere–sea ice–ocean
column model CCAM. We show that the increased insolation during EHIM
has the potential to push the Arctic Ocean sea ice cover into a regime
dominated by seasonal ice, i.e. ice free summers. The strong sea ice
thickness response is caused by the positive sea ice albedo feedback.
Studies of the GRIP ice cores and high latitude North Atlantic sediment
cores show that the Bølling–Allerød period (c. 12,700–14,700 years BP)
was a climatically unstable period in the northern high latitudes and we
speculate that this instability may be linked to dual stability modes
of the Arctic sea ice cover characterized by e.g. transitions between
periods with and without perennial sea ice cover.

Australian Environmentalists take government to court over Barrier Reef plans

They haven't got a leg to stand on but may inflict costly delays

Environmentalists
will launch court action against the Abbott government and its decision
to allow dredging and spoil dumping in Great Barrier Reef waters for
the expansion of coal export terminals.

The Mackay Conservation
Group, backed by $150,000 raised by activist group GetUp!, will file
documents in the Federal Court on Monday challenging the decision on the
grounds the government failed its legal obligations to protect a world
heritage site by approving the project.

It is the second legal
challenge to the proposed Abbot Point development. Last month the North
Queensland Conservation Group launched an appeal against a separate
decision to allow the dumping of dredge spoil in reef waters by the
authority which oversees the marine park protecting the site.

Environment
Minister Greg Hunt approved the Abbot Point project in December under
strict conditions, including the dredging and dumping of three million
tonnes of sludge in the reef's waters to expand coal export terminals.

The
Abbot Point development is one of many resource projects proposed for
the coast along the Great Barrier Reef. Industrial development and other
threats have raised the concern of the World Heritage Committee, which
has asked the Australian and Queensland governments to install several
measure to better protect the reef or else risk it being considered
world heritage "in danger".

The Mackay Conservation Group is
challenging the Abbot Point decision through a provision in the national
environment laws that allow for a judicial review by the Federal Court
of any decision.

Group campaigner Ellen Roberts said the review
would be the first test of national environment laws protecting world
heritage sites.

"If we are successful then potentially the
decision could have implications for other world heritage areas as
well," Ms Roberts said.

Brad Fish, chief executive of the North
Queensland Bulk Ports Corporation, said the focus on dredging had taken
the debate about the reef's future away from the real issues threatening
its survival.

He pointed to an article by University of Central
Queensland coral ecologist Alison Jones and marine scientist and
consultant Brett Kettle posted on The Conversation that said green
groups had wrongly argued dredging and dumping were major threats to the
reef.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

25 March, 2014

Climate scientists refuse to debate global warming with skeptics

The few that have done so have clearly lost so the rest aren't game

Climate
scientists and environmentalists are venting their frustrations
debating those who are skeptical of man-made global warming — and some
have even gone so far as to refuse debating skeptics.

Dan Weiss, the director of climate strategy at the liberal Center
for American Progress, refused to appear on Fox Business to debate
climate skeptic Marc Morano last week. Morano runs the blog Climate
Depot, where he reports on environment and climate news.

Weiss was set to debate Morano on the show “The Independents” but
“refused to debate directly with Morano, and chided [the show] for
airing his views,” according to the Fox Business show.

“In what is part of a growing trend, yet another global
warming activist ducked a TV debate,” Morano told the Daily Caller News
Foundation. “Weiss and other activists claim the debate is so settled
that granting a skeptic ‘equal time’ does some type of disservice to
‘science.’ Climate activists want to impose everything from carbon
taxes, UN treaties, cap-and-trade, EPA regulations, light
bulb restrictions, automobile regulations, even our bedtimes — yet
they will not debate the basis for these actions

“I have had many debate cancellations previously,” Morano added. “In
2010, I was set to debate Hollywood producer James Cameron after weeks
of negotiations, only to have the debate cancelled at the last moment
when my plane landed in Colorado for the debate.”

Stossel also asked the environmental group the Union of Concerned
Scientists if they would debate Spencer on TV. Stossel said UCS replied
that debating Spencer “would be doing the public a disservice because it
would give [his] extreme ideas credibility.” NASA Goddard Institute for
Space Studies climate scientist Gavin Schmidt did go on that episode
but only after Spencer was no longer on the set.

As the debate surrounding global warming has intensified this past
year, some news outlets have opted not to provide a platform for climate
skeptics. Most recently, the BBC Scotland has barred debates between
climate scientists and skeptics from being aired.

Alasdair MacLeod, who is head of editorial standards and compliance
for BBC Scotland, sent an email in February to senior producers and
editors, saying that “we should not run debates / discussions directly
between scientists and sceptics.”

Last year, the Los Angeles Times announced
that it would not be publishing letters to the editor that were
critical of the theory of man-made global warming because the evidence
provided by scientists suggests that human activity is warming the
planet.

“I’m no expert when it comes to our planet’s complex climate
processes or any scientific field,” wrote Paul Thornton, the Times’
letter editor. “Consequently, when deciding which letters should run
among hundreds on such weighty matters as climate change, I must rely on
the experts — in other words, those scientists with advanced degrees
who undertake tedious research and rigorous peer review.”

Pick
up a copy of Obama’s $3.9 trillion budget and there among the TSA fee
hikes, Medicare payment cuts and the $400 million for the Department of
Homeland Security to fight Global Warming is a curious little item.

On
Page 930 of the budget that never ends is $575 million for “family
planning/reproductive health” worldwide especially in "areas where
population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species."

The
idea that the way to protect insects, fish and animals is by preventing
human beings from having children is part of an approach known as
Population, Health and Environment (PHE) which integrates population
control into environmentalist initiatives.

PHE dates back to the
1980s and is practiced by mainstream organizations such as the World
Wildlife Fund. The Smithsonian's Woodrow Wilson Center, which is
funded partly by the US government, aggressively champions PHE eugenics
and USAID funds PHE programs and distributes PHE training manuals
derived in part from Wilson Center materials.

PHE had been baked
into Congressional bills such as the Global Sexual and Reproductive
Health Act of 2013 co-sponsored by Debbie Wasserman-Shultz and Sheila
Jackson-Lee which urged meeting United Nations Millennium Development
Goals by using birth control as, among other things, a means of
"ensuring environmental sustainability".

Obama's budget is more
open about its PHE eugenics agenda. While PHE backers usually claim that
they want to reduce population to prevent famine and promote gender
equality, the PHE budget request explicitly states that its goal is to
reduce human population growth for the sake of the animals, without any
of the usual misleading language about feminism and clean water.

The
budget is a blunt assertion of post-Human values by an administration
that has become notorious for its fanatical environmentalism,
sacrificing people on the altar of Green ideology.

When Obama's
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell visited Alaska, she told the residents
of an Eskimo village where nineteen people had died due to the
difficulty of evacuating patients during medical emergencies that, "I’ve
listened to your stories, now I have to listen to the animals."

Jewell
rejected the road that they needed to save lives because it would
inconvenience the local waterfowl. When it came to choosing between the
people and the ducks, Jewell chose the ducks.

Ducks don't talk,
but environmentalists do, and they had vocally opposed helping the
people of King Cove. Jewell had received the Rachel Carson Award, named
after an environmentalist hero whose fearmongering killed millions.
Compared to the Carson malaria graveyards of Africa, nineteen dead
Eskimos slide off the post-Human conscience of a fanatical
environmentalist like water off a duck's back.

The arguments
against DDT often focused not on saving lives, but on taking them. PHE
prevents children from being born, but environmentalists don't stop with
the unborn. Malaria was an even more effective tool for reducing
populations than targeted abortion and birth control programs.

USAID,
which played a key role in the war on DDT, has openly embraced PHE.
"When couples can plan the number, timing, and spacing of their
children, that helps the environment and the economy." said Beverly
Johnson, chief of the Policy, Evaluation, and Communication Division of
the USAID Office of Population and Reproductive Health.

Environmentalist
population reduction activists originally cloaked their real agenda in
claims about worldwide famine. Paul Erlich, author of The Population
Bomb, had predicted mass starvation by the 1970s and the end of England
by 2000. Today Global Warming activists set empty dates for the
destruction of mankind that they themselves don't believe in.

The
post-Human left seeks to maintain a perpetual state of crisis so that
governments and corporations will be more inclined to accept even
horrifying solutions as the alternative to the end of mankind. What it
does not tell them is that its goal is the end of mankind.

In
February, Population Action International and the Sierra Club sponsored
a Congressional briefing on PHE post-2015. Population Action
International was originally founded as the Population Crisis Committee
in the sixties. Its preceding organizations included the Hugh Moore Fund
for International Peace which claimed that population control was
necessary to defeat Communism.

Like the Communists, the
post-Human activists were adept at disguising their agenda in the
concerns of the moment, shifting from national security, feminism, the
coming Ice Age, mass starvation and now Global Warming.
Environmentalists are even attempting to shoehorn the War on Terror into
their agenda as the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security
Program attempts to tie every terrorist conflict zone from Yemen to Mali
to Global Warming.

Environmentalists are even attempting to
repeat their old trick by trying to shoehorn the War on Terror into
their agenda. The Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security
Program attempts to tie every terrorist conflict zone from Yemen to Mali
to Global Warming.

Paul Erlich, whose book was prompted by the
Sierra Club and carried the same title as Hugh Moore's tract, wrote
that, "We must use our political power to push other countries into
programs which combine agricultural development and population control."
PHE jettisons agricultural development for its exact opposite, but
otherwise it maintains the same formula of tying population control to a
shifting collection of crisis agendas.

Typical of PHE's
intersection of environmentalism and eugenics,the Wilson Center cites a
report which claims that "the effect of a 40 percent reduction in CO2
emissions per capita in developed countries between 2000 and 2050 would
be entirely offset by the increase in emissions attributable to expected
population growth in poorer countries over this period."

The only way to fight Global Warming is Third World population control and eventually First World population control.

Environmentalist
fearmongering has never been about saving people. Its activists, like
Sally Jewell, are too busy playing duck whisperer to care about people.

Green
programs have yet to save lives, but they do cost lives. The elderly in
the United Kingdom are dying of electric poverty after facing cold
winters and shocking price increases due to sustainability mandates,
asthma sufferers are dying because the affordable albuterol inhalers
they used were banned by the EPA and people die in fires and floods, in
natural disasters that could have been prevented, but are instead blamed
on their victims by the environmentalists, who helped make them so
lethal.

Not only do the environmentalists kill, but they profit from the deaths of their victims.

Elliot
Morley, UK Labour's Chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Select
Committee, had directed that flooding in Somerset should be promoted
because “wildlife will benefit from increased water levels”. Baroness
Young, an environmental activist, who had become the chief executive of
the UK's Environment Agency, took steps to increase the possibility of
flooding.

As she said, the formula was "for ‘instant wildlife, just add water’".

When
the flooding came, children were trapped on buses, 7,000 homes were
flooded and many residents lost everything. Environmental activists
blamed Global Warming and "careless farming" for the floods that they
themselves had engineered.

Survivors of the Black Saturday
bushfires in Australia which killed 173 people blamed environmental
regulations for worsening the fires by preventing residents from
clearing trees. The environmentalists blamed Global Warming and sent
around an editorial suggesting that people "who don't like to end up in
flames" should read the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change
report.

California's drought was likewise engineered by environmental activists who then blamed their own handiwork on Global Warming.

Environmentalists
wield unprecedented power over the lives of millions and yet they claim
that each engineered disaster could have been averted if they had only
been given even more power.

The left is not only becoming
post-American or post-Western, but post-Human, applying the same tactics
that they used to target majorities in Western countries to the human
race as a whole. Class war and race war are giving way to species
warfare. And since the ducks cannot talk, ultimate power rests with the
duck whisperers, those who speak for the animals, the fish and the
trees.

The post-Human left takes social justice to its natural
conclusion, going beyond all the human categories to level mankind with
the polar bear, the duck and the microbe. Total equality for the
post-Human left is not the equality of the rich and the poor, of men and
women, of blacks and whites, or even of the First World and the Third
World, but the equality of man and microbe, of a pregnant woman in a
small Alaskan fishing village with a duck and a hungry California child
with the Kangaroo rat.

I
had to check to be sure that it was not yet April Fools Day.
Surely our friends in the UK would not be so unkind as to mislead their
unrepentant ex-colonists over here, would they? The March 23, 2014
Telegraph carried this article stating that “Biofuels do more harm than
good, UN warns.” The United Nations said that?

Of course a
lot of other people have been saying that for years. In 2007,
near-riots took place in Mexico over the increase in corn meal prices
triggered by corn for automobile biofuel alcohol. Even Al Gore fessed-up
in 2010 that his idea for corn ethanol was a “bad idea” prompted by his
presidential ambitions.

What about the U.S. armed forces now
committed to run on green biofuels? What about the U.S. Air
Force? What to tell the Navy?

What to tell the EPA which
has mandated the use of nonexistent stocks of biofuels, and fines
consumers for not using the nonexistent fuel?

The day of
reckoning seems to have come for all these acolytes of the green
goddess. The U.N. IPCC, the self-declared expert on all things
climate, has finally seen the light of reason and perhaps the multitudes
of the food-starved. The new mantra seems to be easier to
swallow…”biofuels bad.”

On
MSNBC’s Morning Joe today, oil magnate T. Boone Pickens boasted of his
oil, gas, wind and solar bona fides — and accused the president of not
just having a poor national energy policy, but of having no national
energy policy at all (h/t NewsBusters).

Co-host Mika Brzezinski said that domestic oil production is up, and
asked her guest what the Obama administration has done that is good
concerning energy.

“Well, they don’t have an
energy policy,” answered Pickens. Brzezinski followed by asking if Obama
has done anything to increase oil production. He replied, “It has
nothing to do with the administration…We’ve gotten someplace, but it’s
because of technology advanced by the industry.”

“What’s getting ready to happen to you,” offered Pickens, “the
horizontal drilling and the multiple frack zones in it, that’s all
going, it’s going to be exported away from America. Is that bad? No,
it’s not bad. It’s an industry developed here, share with other people,
develop reserves.”

“Let me tell you,” Pickens
continued, “you are looking at a fundamental change in energy globally
is what you have. The OPEC nations are going to have the power taken
away from them that they’ve enjoyed for the last twenty years.”

Pickens
also said he couldn’t think of a single time in the last 40 years when
government truly facilitated energy production and said he knows not to
expect the advancement of any kind of coherent policy before the
election because “Obama’s hands are tied.” “The greenies and the Left”
would punish Obama for any defection, for any kind of support (or at
least lack of punishment) for oil and gas production, even though “the
jobs are in the oil and natural gas industry.”

It was unclear
precisely what policy Pickens was promoting, but, for all that he’s
arguably invested more than anyone else in renewable energy, he made it
clear he doesn’t think the time to transition to wind and solar is now:

“Exactly,” replied Pickens. “My issue is not political. I mean, this is
an opportunity for America to advance, get on the back of cheap energy
and recover your economy. It can be done, but we have no plan.”

Pickens continued, “Obama needs to go in, study it, look at it, and
decide what an energy plan is, and then go forward with it. He needs to
explain to his people, ‘Hey, we can get on everything green. We can get
on everything renewable. Then the cost of power will go up ten times.’
So be careful when you start fooling with it. Know what you’re working
with.”

With that last comment, Pickens hit the nail on the head:
At some point, the president and all those responsible for the nation’s
energy policies have to decide whether affordability or renewability
should take priority. Private companies can and should be investing in
renewable energy, but government shouldn’t be propping them up — and
government certainly shouldn’t be trying to force a transition to fuels
that are presently economically unviable.

Given the abundance of
clean, affordable natural gas, the idea that we have to choose between
“dirty” fossil fuels and “clean” renewables is obsolete. The choice is
actually between a clean, affordable fossil fuel and clean, but
expensive renewables. Once we recognize natural gas as the ideal bridge
fuel, we’ll then have a choice between a government-based or
market-based method of incentivizing the transition. That’s where
Pickens and I depart: He’s fine with subsidies for natural gas, whereas I
think the market will eventually take care of the transition itself.

So Thursday evening, I wrote about the Post
article here. I pointed out that Koch is not, in fact, the largest
leaser of tar sands land; that Koch will not be a user of the pipeline
if it is built; and that construction of the Keystone Pipeline would
actually be harmful to Koch’s economic interests, which is why Koch has
never taken a position on the pipeline’s construction. The Keystone
Pipeline, in short, has nothing whatsoever to do with the Koch brothers.

My
post garnered a great deal of attention, and Mufson and Eilperin
undertook to respond to it here... [their] response attempted to explain
“Why we wrote about the Koch Industries [sic] and its leases in
Canada’s oil sands.” Good question! What’s the answer?

The
Powerline article itself, and its tone, is strong evidence that issues
surrounding the Koch brothers’ political and business interests will
stir and inflame public debate in this election year. That’s why we
wrote the piece.

So in the Post’s view, it is acceptable to
publish articles that are both literally false (Koch is the largest tar
sands leaseholder) and massively misleading (the Keystone Pipeline is
all about Koch Industries), if by doing so the paper can “stir and
inflame public debate in this election year?” I can’t top Jonah
Goldberg’s comment on that howler:

By this logic any unfair
attack posing as reporting is worthwhile when people try to correct the
record. Why not just have at it and accuse the Kochs of killing JFK or
hiding the Malaysian airplane? The resulting criticism would once again
provide “strong evidence that issues surrounding the Koch brothers’
political and business interests will stir and inflame public debate in
this election year.”

Let me offer an alternative explanation of
why the Washington Post published their Keystone/Koch smear: 1) The
Washington Post in general, and Mufson and Eilperin in particular, are
agents of the Left, the environmental movement and the Democratic Party.
2) The Keystone Pipeline is a problem for the Democratic Party because
60% of voters want the pipeline built, while the party’s left-wing base
insists that it not be approved. 3) The Keystone Pipeline is popular
because it would broadly benefit the American people by creating large
numbers of jobs, making gasoline more plentiful and bringing down the
cost of energy. 4) Therefore, the Democratic Party tries to distract
from the real issues surrounding the pipeline by claiming, falsely, that
its proponents are merely tools of the billionaire Koch brothers–who,
in fact, have nothing to do with Keystone one way or the other. 5) The
Post published its article to assist the Democratic Party with its
anti-Keystone talking points.

Which frames a very interesting
contrast. The Keystone Pipeline is by no means the only energy-related
controversy these days. “Green” energy is also highly controversial.
“Green” energy is controversial, in part, because, unlike the Keystone
Pipeline, it harms the consumer: solar and wind energy are inefficient,
and therefore raise energy costs to consumers. “Green” energy is also
controversial because it harms taxpayers: because they are inefficient,
solar and wind energy can survive only through taxpayer-funded
subsidies. Further, the federal government has invested in numerous
“green” energy projects that have gone bankrupt, sticking taxpayers with
the tab. Solyndra is only one of a number of such debacles.

“Green”
energy is also controversial because it has been used to enrich
government cronies. Let’s take, for instance, the billionaire Tom
Steyer. Steyer has made much of his fortune by using his government
connections to secure support for uneconomic “green” energy projects
that have profited him, to the detriment of consumers and taxpayers.
See, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. As is
explained here, Tom Steyer is a bitter opponent of the Keystone
Pipeline. His financial interests, in “green” energy and perhaps also in
pre-pipeline oil sources like BP, stand to benefit if Keystone is
killed.

Haven’t heard much about Tom Steyer, you say? Maybe
that’s because he isn’t heavily involved in politics. Heh–just kidding.
Steyer, as you probably know, is one of the biggest donors to the
Democratic Party and its candidates. This year, he has pledged to
contribute $100 million to the campaigns of Democratic candidates, as
long as they toe the line on environmental issues–which includes,
presumably, taxpayer support for “green” energy and opposition to
Keystone.

So the Post could have written a very different story
about the Keystone Pipeline. The Post could have written that opposition
to the pipeline is being funded in large part by a billionaire who has a
personal financial interest in the pipeline not being built. And that’s
not all! The billionaire is a political crony who has used his
connections in Washington to get rich and to fleece consumers and
taxpayers. Now, with Keystone, he is doing it again! How is that for a
story that would “stir and inflame public debate in this election year”?

The Post, of course, didn’t write that story...

Hinderaker
observes that the Post has written glowing puff pieces about Tom
Steyer. Oh, and that John Podesta -- head of the Center for American
Progress -- is a cheerleader for Steyer for (yes, you guessed it) Energy
Secretary. Neither Steyer nor Eilperin happened to mention that Steyer
would benefit financially -- in a major way -- from nixing the Keystone
pipeline.

Further, "reporter" Juliet Eilperin is married to
Andrew Light, who opines on climate policy for the Center for American
Progress, the Marxist front group that has spent a year attacking
private citizens like the Koch brothers.

Oh, and Eilperin's
husband is also a member of the Obama administration, serving as "Senior
Adviser to the Special Envoy on Climate Change in the Department of
State" (the title alone is proof that the budget for the Department of
State needs to be slashed by 80 percent).

So Eilperin quoted her
husband's boss in a puff piece on radical billionaire leftist Tom
Steyer, who would benefit greatly from the death of Keystone.

Hinderaker adds one additional data-point: Tom Steyer sits on the board of the Center for American Progress.

My opinion is that the Washington Post is not so much a news organization as it is a 24-by-7 infomercial for the radical Left.

It
is truly a Hollywood epic of biblical proportions, the original
disaster story of the man chosen by God to undertake the greatest rescue
in history before an apocalyptic flood engulfs the world.

But
even before it opens in America this week and Britain on April 4, Noah, a
$130 million blockbuster with Russell Crowe in the lead role, is
already awash in a turbulent sea of controversy.

The film, packed
with special effects based around a massive replica arc built in Long
Island near New York, also stars Sir Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah and
Emily Watson, the Harry Potter actress, as Noah's adopted daughter.

Noah's
director Darren Aronofsky, a self-described atheist who made the
Oscar-nominated hit The Black Swan, has described the movie as is "the
least biblical biblical film ever made" and called Noah "the first
environmentalist". According to one early review, the name "God" is not
actually spoken at any stage.Now, amid a wave of criticism from some
Christian groups about its loose interpretation of a sacred script, the
Paramount studio has taken the unusual step of issuing an "explanatory
message" to accompany marketing material.

It notes that while the
film is "inspired by the story of Noah... artistic licence has been
taken". And it adds, for anyone unclear about the source material: "The
biblical story of Noah can be found in the book of Genesis." It has also
highlighted praise for the film by some Christian leaders.

After
advance test screenings, there were complaints that the film did not
adhere strictly enough to the Old Testament verses and portrays Noah as
an environmental crusader to deliver a secular ecological doomsday
message.

"The insertion of the extremist environmental agenda is a
problem," said Jerry Johnson, president of the National Religious
Broadcasters group.

The Pope was dragged into the debate when
Crowe tried but failed to secure a private audience during a recent
visit to Rome to promote the film there.

The famously
rabble-rousing star even sent a series of pleading messages to the
pontiff's Twitter account urging him to watch the "fascinating" film.

The
Vatican quashed both proposals. Rev Federico Lombardi, the spokesman,
said that the Pope would not watch the film and nor would the Noah team
Crowe be granted an audience.

Aronofsky's version of Noah is
described as a "dark parable about sin, justice and mercy" in which Noah
must decide who is good enough to make it on the boat that will save
humanity. But Paramount has now issued its note of "explanation" for
viewers."While artistic license has been taken, we believe that this
film is true to the essence, values, and integrity of a story that is a
cornerstone of faith for millions of people worldwide," it states.Crowe
has also addressed the criticisms, saying that the film was not
intended to be a "Sunday school story" and would challenge viewers'
understanding of the Bible.

Brian Godawa, a Hollywood
screenwriter and commentator on Christian issues, was one of the first
to raise religious alarms after seeing an early version of the script.

In
an article titled Darren Aronofsky's Noah: Environmentalist Wacko, he
said the director transformed a scriptural story into "environmental
paganism" by blaming the Great Flood on man's "disrespect" for the
environment.

It is not of course the first time that Hollywood
epics have come under fire from some biblical scholars for their
interpretation of the scriptures. Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments both
faced similar criticism, And even strict adherents to the Bible note a
problem in trying to make a film out of the story of Noah - it is just
40 verses in length, which would make for about 10 minutes on screen.

"Noah
is a very short section of the Bible with a lot of gaps, so we
definitely had to take some creative expression in it," producer Scott
Franklin told Entertainment Weekly. "But I think we stayed very true to
the story and didn't really deviate from the Bible, despite the
six-armed angels."

In a effort to stymie the criticism, Paramount
has just released a new eight-minute promotional video called Noah
Featurette running praise from Christian leaders for the film.

"Movies
aren't meant to preach. Movie's aren't sermons, and so if they can
bring up the topic and start conversations, that's a good movie," said
Karen Covell, founder of the Hollywood Prayer Network. "And this one
made me ask questions."

Phil Cooke, a Christian media producer
and consultant, who has advised the studio on the film, said:
"Christians have to stop looking at Hollywood as the enemy, and start
reaching out.

Missionaries have discovered that you don't change
minds by criticism, boycotts or threats. You change minds by developing
a relationship and a sense of trust."

Christians in America and
Britain will at least have the chance to reach their own conclusions
about whether the film takes too many liberties with the account of
Noah's ark and the great flood, a story that features in varying forms
in many major world religions.

For cinema-goers in many Muslim
countries, there will be no such opportunity. Noah has already been
banned there because it depicts a Koranic prophet, a taboo in the
Islamic world.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

24 March, 2014

Unsettling “Settled Science”

I
was making a Costco run with my friend George on Friday, and the
subject of the weather came up. It was a nice day, relatively speaking,
but Saturday was going to be nicer – nearly 70 degrees. This was a nice
change of pace from the polar vortexes and dump trucks full of snow
we’ve been hit with here in Maryland for the past three months. Then I
looked at my iPhone and noted the forecast calls for another possible
large snowstorm Tuesday.

George said that seemed a little far
away to predict such things with any certainty, and he’s right.
Considering meteorologists rarely can tell you with any accuracy what
happened yesterday, why should they be believed on what will happen next
week? The fact is they shouldn’t.

What drives me nuts, as I told
George, isn’t that they’re wrong so often. It’s the certainty with
which they make predictions knowing they don’t truly know and so often
are so off-base. It’s at this time that George, a medical doctor with a
master’s degree in biology, a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and minor
in chemistry, laughed, saying, “Nothing is absolute in science, except
maybe in physics.” (Another area he spent a lot of time studying. He’s
an over-achiever.)

It’s true: We know very little about the world in which we live or even our own bodies.

The
Earth was flat and the sun revolved around it. Bleedings were
prescribed for healing at one point by science. But we don’t need to go
back that far to find confusion and contradictions in “settled science.”

Smoking
causes cancer, but not in everyone and we don’t know why. Why eating a
diet of fried foods makes one person fat but with normal blood pressure
and someone else can be incredibly fit with a healthy diet but have high
blood pressure remains an unknown. Science, at it’s most certain, is
probability – sometimes extremely high, but still not 100 percent. And
it’s changing all the time.

A few years ago, we were told
saturated fat caused heart disease, and polyunsaturated fat was a “good
fat” that was great for the heart. Labels were changed to highlight the
absence of one and the presence of the other. Diets were launched.
Cookbooks were written. Lives were altered. And it may all have been for
naught.

The UK Telegraph reported this week, “Scientists have
discovered that saturated fat does not cause heart disease while
so-called ‘healthy’ polyunsaturated fats do not prevent cardiovascular
problems.” This wasn’t just a 180-degree turn from what we “knew” to be
true, it’s a full 540-degree loop from what used to be orthodoxy.

The
fact is we don’t know which fats are good, if any, and which are bad,
if any, with any certainty. What two months ago was known to be true,
beyond any doubt, is now known to be false.

The true nature of
science is truth-seeking, rarely finding. But in that seeking, some
truth can be found. That smoking is unhealthy, even if it doesn’t cause
cancer in someone, is beyond question. That a bleeding is not the best
treatment for pneumonia seems obvious, even though it once was the
treatment for it. It was the consensus, it was “settled science.”

The
concept of “settled science” based on majority vote is the mantra of
the climate change industry. Were pro-lifers to flood the field of
biology, become the majority and vote that life unequivocally begins at
conception, they’d reject the notion by a show of hands.

Science,
by its very nature, requires proof. And proof is the one thing the
hierarchy of the environmentalist movement hasn’t provided. Newsweek
once wrote, “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns
have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a
drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications
for just about every nation on earth.” (Emphasis added.) Quite a few
qualifiers in that sentence, don’t you think?

This was from an
article in 1975 entitled, “The Cooling World” about the consensus among
scientists that we were on the verge of a new ice age. (Read the whole
thing here.) The science was settled. The vote had been taken. We were
doomed. Only someone forget to tell the planet because the ice age
didn’t happen.

Yet the solutions proposed then – more government
control of the economy and us, higher taxes, less freedom, etc. – are
nearly identical to the “solutions” proposed for global warming decades
later. Since the planet hasn’t warmed in 18 years, despite consensus
that it would, the catch-all term has been updated to “climate change.”
This empowered progressives to blame anything on it – cold, hot, storms,
droughts. But the solutions are constant – the same governmental power
expansion they’ve been seeking for nearly a century.

Their faith, if not their facts, remains unwavering.

They
believe in “science” – just ask them – but they hide their data from
skeptical scrutiny and coordinate efforts to “hide the decline” in
temperatures. Science is the seeking and understanding of provable fact –
it’s knowledge, precisely what these progressives and academics seek to
keep from the masses.

Ironically, the very people who attack
anyone who dares question their faith is labeled a shill for “big oil.”
Meanwhile those progressives control the bureaucracy that oversees the
government spigot from which flows billions of dollars in grants to
academics to study more “climate change.”

This leads to an
obvious questions: If temperatures are rising, and it’s an irrefutable
fact that humans are to blame, why does it require hundreds of millions
of dollars to continue to prove it each year?

The answer is
simple – scientists and academia is every bit as addicted to the money
that flows to the belief in manmade climate change as they accuse
skeptics of being to money from oil companies.

Progressives have
their agenda. The American public rejects it – at the polls, when they
run on it in campaigns, or later when they are again found to have
concealed it. But they don’t care. What they can’t get at the ballot
box, they seek from the courts.

What they can’t get in the
courts, they seek through regulation. When they can’t win an argument,
they create a moral imperative to justify it (ironic considering they’ve
spent decades telling conservative “you can legislate morality”).

“Save
the planet,” “For the children,” and so on have been the battle cry of
the greatest affronts to liberty this country has ever seen. And it’s
all funded by the very taxpayers who oppose the end result – against
their will and without their knowledge.

It’s the ultimate article
of faith, a religion based not on a Supreme Being, but the supremacy of
certain beings – progressives. But while there’s no proof God doesn’t
exist, there’s ample proof their agenda does not work. Undeterred, they
press on … ever “forward.”

The Holy Church of Global Warming (a
wholly owned subsidiary of Climate Change, Inc. and its bureaucratic and
political clergy in the progressives movement) are every bit as much a
religion as any church you can name. It’s a religion based on faith not
in a higher power but in a better, smarter group of people who know
better how you should live your life than you do.

Just like those
who tell you what’s good to eat, drink, etc., progressives would like
people to believe science is on their side, and that once a vote is
taken it is settled. Of course, science isn’t consensus. It’s not about a
majority vote. And unlike the reality of their failed agenda, it
rarely, if ever, is settled.

Lawmakers looking to renew the wind production tax credit that just won’t die

Unfortunately,
we knew this was coming. The wildly generous wind production tax credit
that provides 2.3 cents/kilowatt-hour of energy during the first ten
years of a project’s operation, as well as the investment tax credit
worth up to 30 percent of the costs of developing wind turbines, have
been allowed to lapse multiple times over the years, only to be
resurrected — zombie-like — shortly thereafter. The well-monied wind
lobby has its hands full with the industry-wide freakout that ensues
every time the tax credits near their expiration dates, since wind
energy is so thoroughly reliant on federal special treatment for
survival, and credits’ expiration at the end of 2013 resulted in a whole
lotta’ wind project proposals making it in under the wire during last
year’s fourth quarter.

But that expiration was never going to be allowed to stand for long. Via The Hill:

A
group of 144 members of the Congress sent letters Friday urging their
colleagues to renew tax credits that help the wind energy industry. …

“Like
all businesses, the wind industry seeks certainty and predictability so
that long-term project decisions and investments can be made,” said the
letter signed by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mark Udall
(D-Colo.), along with 24 other senators.

“Without that stability,
we once again risk losing many of the jobs, infrastructure and
investment that the wind industry has created,” they wrote.

Reps. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Dave Loebsack (D-Iowa) sent a similar letter along with 116 of their colleagues. …

“We
look forward to Congress, in particular the Senate Finance Committee,
acting quickly to extend the PTC and ITC so that the U.S. remains a
global leader and our businesses can continue building, expanding and
hiring,” Tom Kiernan, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, said
in a Friday statement.

Dear Tom Kiernan and wind’s Congressional
apologists (Democrats and “small government, free-market” Republicans):
Since, as you say, the wind industry cannot “continue building,
expanding and hiring” without these tax credits in place, maybe you are
in the wrong industry. At this stage, by your own admission, wind energy
cannot yet compete with alternative sources like natural gas — so maybe
instead of throwing gobs of taxpayer money at building political
preferred energy infrastructure that has yet to achieve competitive
price efficiency, you could maybe throw some of that cash into R&D,
or at least just stop wasting it? I absolutely agree that the wind
industry needs some stability to work with, which is precisely why these
subsidies should be eliminated once and for all instead of going along
in this costly, torturous shame cycle of special-interest pandering.

For
years environmentalists have usurped individual private property rights
and thwarted economic development. Now, thanks to Oklahoma Attorney
General Scott Pruitt, it appears that the job creators may have finally
learned something from the extreme tactics of groups, like the Wild
Earth Guardians and the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), which
have been using the courts to their advantage by filing lawsuits against
the federal government.

On Monday, March 17, on behalf of the
state of Oklahoma and the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance (DEPA),
Pruitt filed a lawsuit against the federal government, specifically the
U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
(FWS). The lawsuit alleges the “FWS engaged in ‘sue and settle’ tactics
when the agency agreed to settle a lawsuit with a national environmental
group over the [Endangered Species Act] listing status of several
animal species, including the Lesser Prairie Chicken.”

The Lesser
Prairie Chicken (LPC) is especially important, as the FWS is
required—based on the conditions set forth in the settlement of a 2010
lawsuit—to make a determination, explicitly, on the LPC by March 31,
2014. A “threatened” listing would restrict the land use in the bird’s
40-million-acre, five-state habitat: Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas, New
Mexico, and Kansas. The affected area includes private, state, and
federal lands—lands rich in energy resources, ranch and farm land—plus,
municipal infrastructure, such as water pipelines and electric
transmission.

Understanding the negative impact a listing would
have, industry (oil and gas, electric transmission and distribution,
pipelines, agriculture and wind energy), states, and the FWS have
collaborated to develop a historic range-wide plan (RWP) to demonstrate
that the LPC and its prairie habitat can be protected without needing to
list it. The RWP includes habitat management goals and conservation
practices to be applied throughout the LPC’s range. According to a press
release about the Oklahoma law suit, the cooperative effort has spent
$26 million dollars on the voluntary conservation plan—which would be
more than enough to protect restore LPC habitat, as well as to develop
an elaborate state-of-the-art LPC hatchery. RWP enrollees are optimistic
the FWS can cite the conservation commitment as justification for a
decision not to list the LPC as a threatened species.

A DEPA
spokesman states: “this designation could disrupt drilling and
exploration on hundreds of thousands of very promising oil and gas lands
in this part of the country.” The CBD has made no secret of their
disdain for oil and gas extraction and has filed many successful
lawsuits specifically to block development.

Pruitt says: “the
sue-and-settle timelines force the FWS to make determinations without a
thorough review of the science. This violates the original statute
requiring sound science before listing species.”

Stephen Moore,
formerly with the Wall Street Journal, explains: “Under the Obama
administration, the feds have entered into a consent agreement with the
environmentalists to rush forward a judgment on an unprecedented number
of species. A 2012 Chamber of Commerce study found record numbers of
such ‘sue and settle’ cases under Obama.” Pruitt adds: “Under President
Obama, we have had sue and settle on steroids.”

Political impacts

The
“rush” as Moore calls it, is being driven by the desire to get the
decisions made under the friendly Obama Administration—which may appease
the environmental base while, unwittingly, hurting Democrats in the
2014 elections and handing the Senate to Republicans.

The LPC
decision impacts five western states, from which even Democrat Senators,
aware of the potential economic impact, sent a letter to the FWS asking
to delay listing the LPC as threatened. The next big listing is the
Greater Sage Grouse (GSG) with a habitat covering eleven western states.
If the LPC is listed, after the groundbreaking efforts to preserve its
habitat, there will be no similar cooperation on the GSG. The GSG will
surely be listed—triggering a modern Sage Brush Rebellion and costing
Democrats the Senate (and some House seats, too).

The Democrats
are in a bind. The rushed listings are being forced by the environmental
base, which is myopically focused on the anti-fossil-fuel (job-killing)
agenda of restricting oil-and-gas development on western lands and
isn’t looking at the bigger political consequences.

It appears
the decision has been made. Sources tell me that Dan Ashe, Director of
the FWS, has called a meeting on Capitol Hill to brief the stakeholders
prior to Thursday’s announcement. If he decides to list the LPC,
Pruitt’s lawsuit could be just the first shot that ignites the new
rebellion pushing states to take control of the lands within their
borders.

Kent Holsinger, a Colorado-based attorney specializing
in Endangered Species Act (ESA) issues, told me: “State wildlife
management is much more efficient and effective than federal listings.
Oklahoma and DEPA should be commended for pushing back on these issues.”

The environmentalists are looking at the end, but not the political means.

The
issue of global warming was revitalized for me when I made a statement
that the current global temperature is 58 degrees Fahrenheit and this
has only risen by half a degree in the past century. This stimulated a
wonderful friend of mine, Josh Gnaizda, to challenge me to provide the
data . The two of us together discussed and investigated the data.

What
I concluded, and I think Josh joins me, is that the thermometer data
which goes back at least a hundred fifty years is not very reliable
because it probably covered less than 15 percent of the globe and was
derived from a changing sample of thermometers.

3-23
satellitesIt didn't include oceans, the poles and most of the
uninhabited world of Russia, China and Africa as well as mountain
ranges. Furthermore there is strong evidence of changing and
backdating numbers for different stations. This was evident in the
disclosures about the Hadley Center at East Anglia University and my
own records of the data. (It was a Russian computer college
that publicly disclosed the email evidence of the fraud.)

Fortunately,
at the very same time that a rise in global temperature was occurring
according to thermometer data, it was the first year the United States
put a satellite in orbit to measure global temperatures.

Since
that time we have gathered 34 years of satellite data from at least five
different satellites. There are two extraordinary advantages of the new
data.

The first is that we do not have to deal with selecting
thermometer stations to be added or subtracted from the data . The
satellites circle the globe roughly every 90 minutes and they cover the
entire planet so that the number they come up with after each
circumnavigation is a reliable number. We have data now from
12,400 days.

The second thing that we have is observations of the
most rapid increase in temperature for the globe, that occurred between
the beginning of 1996 and late Spring of 1998. We know that that
rapid rise occurred and was accurately measured.

Now
that we have the data you can manipulate it by going to our Google
Documents page here, and take the data to use for your own
purposes.

This is important because the conclusions you come to
are your own. They probably won’t match many other people’s
observations of the same data.

My personal conclusion on the
basis of this 34 years of reliable data is that if you take the full 34
years we will see a roughly 1.2 degree centigrade increase in global
temperature for a century if it continues exactly as it did for the 34
years. That is considerably lower than the IPCC’s lowest
estimate.

However I see two different global temperature
patterns in the satellite data. One period was stable from 1979 to
1996. Then there was a global disruption between 1996 and 1998
that set the new global temperature level .3 degrees centigrade
higher. It has been stable again for the period 1998 to
2014. If we project the pattern from the past 16 years forward we
see virtually no increase in global temperature for the rest of the
century.

I need not make any strong statements about global
warming. If you want to take the full 34 years of reliable satellite
data you will get a 1.2 degrees centigrade warming over the next
century. If you want to take the most recent (roughly) half
that amount of data, you will find virtually no global warming trend.

If the temperatures don’t increase like the IPCC claimed, then there’s only one option left - to increase the hype:

UN
scientists are set to deliver their darkest report yet on the impacts
of climate change, pointing to a future stalked by floods, drought,
conflict and economic damage if carbon emissions go untamed.

A
draft of their report, seen by the news organisation AFP, is part of a
massive overview by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
likely to shape policies and climate talks for years to come.

Strange, given the IPCC only last year conceded that much of the predicted disaster wasn’t actually happening.

In fact, according to one of the most important climate-related measures of all, we are doing brilliantly:

EPA and other agencies pile on costs and delays, as saboteurs reveal acute vulnerabilities

Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek

Government
agencies are forcing us to spend countless billions on illusory risks
and anti-fossil fuel mandates, while ignoring real threats to our
livelihoods, living standards and lives.

America runs on
electricity. Our lights, refrigerators, air conditioners and furnace
controls, computers and internet, social media, radios and televisions,
banks and ATMs, cell phone chargers and transmitters, electric cars and
gasoline pumps, hospitals and schools, offices, factories, refineries,
farms and water purification systems – all run on electricity. 68% is
generated by fossil fuels, 20% by nuclear and 7% by hydropower.

Electricity
reaches its billions of destinations through a complex, interconnected
system of power lines, substations and transformers called the power
grid. The entire United States is divided into just three separate grid
segments: East, West and Texas

Without abundant, reliable,
affordable electricity, America would sink into Third World status. If
our electricity were cut off for a prolonged period, the nation would
collapse into survivalist chaos.

And yet President Obama insists
that electricity prices must “necessarily skyrocket” and the United
States must be “a global leader in the fight against climate change.”
Secretary of State John Kerry calls climate change “the world's most
fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy
says there is “no more urgent threat to public health than climate
change.”

In response, using faulty computer models and secretive
pseudo-science, federal agencies are imposing “social cost of carbon”
analyses, carbon dioxide emission limits and “carbon capture and
storage” standards. They are implementing stringent pollution, drilling,
mining and other regulations – and requiring costly power grid upgrades
to accommodate expensive, unreliable, intermittent electricity from
wind and solar installations. They are compelling the early closure of
efficient, low-cost coal-fired power plants, with many remaining years
of productive life, thereby raising electricity prices for businesses
and families, and forcing ratepayers to pay for mothballed plants and
new ones to replace them.

They are spending 20 billion taxpayer
dollars a year just on climate change initiatives, while forcing the
electric power industry to spend billions of dollars every year to
comply with a plethora of rules. The Heritage Foundation calculates that
EPA’s proposed climate regulations alone will cost our economy $2.2
trillion between 2015 and 2038.

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration is ignoring real threats.

On
April 16, 2013, saboteurs attacked a power substation near San Jose,
California, the Wall Street Journal reported on February 5. They cut
fiber optic cables in a manner designed to maximize repair time and shot
up 17 transformers, causing them to leak their oil coolant, overheat
and fail.

It took them less than an hour, after which they
disappeared into the night, leaving no fingerprints on more than 100
cartridges. It took 27 days to get the substation back online.
Thankfully, grid operators were able to reroute power and avoid
blackouts. Otherwise we could have repeated the 2003 transformer failure
that triggered a cascading blackout affecting 50 million people in the
eastern USA and Canada.

Former Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission (FERC) director Jon Wellinghoff called the attack
“purposeful, extremely well planned and executed by professionals who
had expert training.” Other utility experts said it could have been a
“dress rehearsal” for much bigger operation. One called it “preparation
for an act of war,” in which a few terrorists with cheap bolt cutters
and bullets unleash a real weapon of mass destruction – not an imaginary
one – as calamitous as what an electromagnetic pulse or
hacker-initiated computer system meltdown could inflict.

Many
substations are in rural areas, with no human staff, protected only by
cameras and chain-link fences. On a hot summer day, experts fear, by
destroying or disabling a dozen carefully chosen interconnection
substations and transformers, terrorists could set off cascading
blackouts, taking down much of the US or even North American power grid
for an extended period.

Communications, jobs, food, fuel, safe
drinking water and other benefits of modern civilization would quickly
disappear. The United States could be plunged into darkness, chaos,
crime, anarchy and widespread deaths. Even smaller, less coordinated
attacks could be devastating across entire regions.

Replacing
these huge, 40-ton, high-voltage, multi-million-dollar transformers
could take weeks, months, a year or more, depending on many factors. Few
American companies make the big transformers, and those factories could
be affected by the blackout. Replacing one behemoth recently took
nearly two years and a 7,000-mile journey from Korea. Bringing one of
these monsters in on rush basis could require a jumbo cargo plane that
only one country builds: Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Who could
launch such an act of war? Al Qaeda, Iran and North Korea certainly come
to mind. Even Mexican drug cartels are suspects, after an attack on
power installations in Mexico’s Michoacan State.

Nevertheless,
within weeks of the first WSJ article, Russia invaded Crimea, Secretary
Kerry said the “aggression” would bring “serious repercussions,”
President Obama worked on his short game and March Madness
“bracketology,” and 28 Senate Democrats held an all-night gabfest to
rant and obsess about – climate change! None of them mentioned the
threat of terrorist attacks on our grid and nation.

Just as
maddening, responsibility for protecting the grid is apparently not in
the job description of any US government agency. Homeland Security says
it is the utility industry’s job, and FERC recently gave the industry
until early June 2014 to propose new standards for securing critical
facilities against threats of this nature and magnitude.

Thankfully,
the industry is taking the challenge very seriously and is examining
ways to improve both site security and the equipment replacement
process. Mr. Wellinghoff says “there are probably less than 100 critical
high-voltage substations that need to be protected from physical
attack. It is neither a monumental task, nor would it take an inordinate
sum of money to do so.”

Defining “inordinate” is not easy,
however, especially in the context of other regulatory demands.
Utilities will have to find the money, while also spending billions to
comply with countless environmental rules of dubious value. The
Congressional EMP Commission estimates the cost of hardening the
national grid will be about $2 billion. But all the necessary
precautions will likely run into the tens of billions.

Virginia’s
Dominion Resources alone plans to spent up to $500 million over the
next seven years to harden its facilities, the WSJ reports. Multiply
that and 24/7/365 monitoring times numerous other utility companies,
facilities and weak points, and the price tag is significant. But the
Obama Administration and many members of Congress are intent on spending
billions for climate change “prevention” and health and environmental
rules that will bring minuscule benefits, because the risks are
exaggerated to illusory.

Responsible federal and state
legislators, utility companies and citizen groups need to make
protecting America’s electrical transmission system and civilization
against terror attacks a high priority – and a central topic in the 2014
campaign debates and elections.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

23 March, 2014

European governments rip up renewable contracts

Governments
across Europe, regretting the over-generous deals doled out to the
renewable energy sector, have begun reneging on them. To slow ruinous
power bills hikes, governments are unilaterally rewriting contracts and
clawing back unseemly profits.

In Italy, one of Europe’s largest
economies and one that lavished billions in subsidies on the renewable
sector, the government in 2013 applied its so-called “Robin Hood tax” to
renewable energy producers. Under the new rule, renewable energy
producers with more than €3 million in revenue and income greater than
€300,000 must now pay a tax of 10.5%.

That follows a 2012 move to
charge all solar producers a five cent tax per kilowatt hour on all
self-consumed energy. The government also told solar producers that it
would stop taking their power – and would offer no compensation – when
their output overwhelms the system.

The result of these and other
changes, says the solar industry, has been a surge in bankruptcies and a
massive decrease in solar investment.

In Belgium – where both
regional and federal bodies hand out renewable subsidies – a number of
retroactive changes have capped the largesse renewable producers once
received. In one region the price for “green certificates” – which
producers received for renewable energy – was slashed by 79%. The
government original committed to buy green certificates at a benchmarked
price for 20 years, then cut it to 10 years.

Belgium’s
regulators tried to impose a fee on all energy added to the grid from
small- to medium-sized solar producers. While the country’s court of
appeals struck down that fee, a defiant regional government plans to
reintroduce it next year, forcing all solar producers to pay an annual
fee that varies with the power they pump into the grid. Various
municipalities, meanwhile, are introducing taxes on new and existing
wind turbines.

As in Italy, Belgium’s renewable sector in the
county has gone dark –“imploded” in the view of a solar industry
publication. Many companies shrank or went bankrupt.

In France
the government last year cut by 20% the “guaranteed” rate offered to all
solar producers, and retroactively applied it to projects connected to
the grid in the previous three months. The government is also
considering ending an 11% tax break on solar energy producers.

Perhaps
the most dramatic moves occurred in Spain, for years the poster child
for those touting a transition to green energy. Since 2000, Spain has
given renewable producers $41-billion more for their power than it has
fetched on the open market. To recover those subsidies, the Spanish
government recently killed its Feed In Tariff (FIT) program for
renewables, which paid them an outlandishly high guaranteed price for
their power, replacing it with the market price for their power plus a
subsidy deemed more “reasonable.” Companies’ profits are now capped at a
7.4% return, following which they must then sell their power at market
rates. That measure is retroactive, with renewable energy producers who
got too fat off their profits now being starved until they reach the
7.4% cap.

For example, if a company spent $100-million on a solar
installation in Spain and was posting a return of 14%, or $14-million,
annually on that investment, then the government would cut it off from
subsidies until its total return – starting from when it was first built
– fell to 7.4%, or $7.4 million, a year.

Wind projects built
before 2005 will no longer receive any form of subsidy – a move a wind
energy trade group called a “sacking” of the sector that will see more
than a third of wind producers lose their subsidy.

The fallout in
Spain was immediate. Its solar sector, which once employed 60,000
workers, now employs 5,000. The wind sector is estimated to have laid
off 20,000 workers. Ikea – the Swedish furniture retailer that became
enamoured of renewables – announced it was cutting its losses and
abandoning a solar plant it had built in Spain. Investment in the sector
also collapsed. In 2011, Spain attracted $10 billion in solar
investment. In 2013, the level of investment dropped by almost 90%.

Spain’s
Supreme Court offered no sympathy to the solar industry, in ruling
against its argument that the government’s retroactive changes were
wrong. “The evolution of the energy sector … was putting the
financial sustainability of the electricity system at risk,” the court
decided, adding that the companies “do not have a right [to expect the
government compensation regime] not to be changed.”

Europe’s
renewable energy investors are facing a harsh reality – that the
promises from politicians can be taken away at any moment. Canada’s
renewable energy investors may soon face that same reality.

Environmental
groups fired a shot Tuesday in the growing discussion about natural gas
exports as they urged President Obama to block new export terminals on
climate change grounds.

The flashpoint is a $3.8 billion Dominion
Resources-proposed export facility in Cove Point, Md., on the
Chesapeake Bay, which the groups are rallying to prevent as a burgeoning
effort to prohibit exports of fossil fuels.

"The truth is that
Cove Point, like other proposed [liquefied natural gas] export
terminals, will raise U.S. gas prices -- harming virtually all Americans
-- while becoming a historic catalyst for more fracking across the
Mid-Atlantic and triggering a huge new pulse of climate pollution,"
wrote the 16 groups, which included the Sierra Club, Earthjustice and
Environmental Action.

Sign Up for the Politics Today newsletter!The
groups demanded Obama direct the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
to perform an environmental impact statement for the project rather than
the less stringent environmental assessment it decided to pursue last
week.

"We call on you to reverse course on this plan and commit
instead to keeping most of our nation’s fossil fuel reserves in the
ground, in line with the recommendations of most of the world’s leading
climate scientists," they said.

But the missive is coming amid growing Capitol Hill support for exporting natural gas for geopolitical reasons.

Republicans,
with some Democrats, are pushing the Obama administration to expedite
export approvals as a means to reduce Russia's grip on energy supplies
in Central and Eastern Europe, a position it uses to wield political
influence.

Those lawmakers have pointed to the situation in
Ukraine, where the country's state of Crimea voted to join Russia over
the weekend in a referendum the United States has refused to recognize.
Russian President Vladimir Putin officially announced that it had
annexed Crimea on Tuesday.

But export proponents argue the Energy
Department's approval process is too slow. It must determine that
shipments to nations lacking a free-trade agreement with the U.S. are in
the public interest. It has given the OK to six such projects, with 24
pending.

Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and John Hoeven, R-N.D.,
pushed the administration Tuesday to render a decision on the
outstanding applications within 60 days and expand preferable natural
gas export status beyond free-trade nations, while also conducting a
strategic review of U.S. energy policies and establishing a joint
U.S.-European Union initiative on energy security.

"[A]cting
strategically to increase our natural gas exports will weaken Putin’s
grip on energy supplies for Europe and Ukraine,” Warner said. “We’re
suggesting a comprehensive, bipartisan approach that will have a
positive impact in the near term and the longer term on the energy
security of Ukraine and the EU.”

In the House, the Energy and
Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Energy and Power is scheduled to
hold a hearing next week on a bill that would immediately green-light
all natural gas export applications on file at the Energy Department.
The measure also would make it easier for future projects to gain
approval by allowing all World Trade Organization members to go through
the less-stringent review currently afforded to nations that have
free-trade deals with the U.S.

Opponents of natural gas exports
have argued that the U.S. won't be supplying Ukraine or the rest of
Europe anytime soon, if at all. Just one U.S. export terminal is slated
to go online before 2017, and even then much of the gas is likely
Asia-bound, where the price spread is greatest.

Some Democrats
also have suggested exports would raise domestic natural gas prices,
undercutting a competitive advantage for U.S. manufacturers.

A
December 2012 Energy Department-commissioned study by NERA Economic
Consulting said marginal price increases would occur, but that natural
gas exports were still a net winner for the economy.

Environmental
groups aired the price issue in their letter, and said exports would
incentivize hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that many of them oppose.

"President
Obama, exporting [liquefied natural gas] is simply a bad idea in almost
every way. We again implore you to shift course on this disastrous push
to frack, liquefy and export this climate-wrecking fossil fuel," they
said.

If
the early 21st century is the “golden age of gas,” as the International
Energy Agency has declared, who will be its king? Until 2009, the
answer seemed obvious: Russia. But a funny thing happened on the way to
the “third Rome” that Russian nationalists view as their destiny. In
that year, propelled by the technological innovations of hydraulic
fracturing (or “fracking”) and horizontal drilling, U.S. gas production
surpassed that of Russia.

As crisis erupts in the Ukraine and
policymakers struggle to regain our footing amidst its geopolitical
aftershocks, we can indeed be grateful that the United States has
surpassed Russia as the world’s largest producer of natural gas. Though
largely symbolic, observers have still noted the psychological
importance that the rise of shale gas and the fall of Russia from the
top of the world’s “League Table” of natural gas producers has had in
the offices of Gazprom and the Kremlin. Within the worldview of Russian
President Vladimir Putin's and his inner circle of KGB veterans, this
sort of thing might seem to matter a great deal. Meanwhile, as U.S.
leaders react to the Ukrainian crisis, the call has now gone out from
both Democrats and Republicans for the U.S. to wield its “gas weapon”
and commence exports to Europe immediately.

In the world of
energy infrastructure, however, the pace of change moves much slower
than that of a major international crisis. The first U.S. export
terminal for liquified national gas (LNG) is still under construction in
Sabine Pass, Louisiana, and is not scheduled to come online until late
2015. Moreover, the contracted destination for most of the currently
planned U.S. exports of natural gas is Japan, where demand skyrocketed
after the Fukushima disaster and the shuttering of that country's
nuclear power plants. According to BP, the 2012 average price (evening
out seasonal variations) per million British thermal units (Btu) of
natural gas was $16.75 in Japan, more than 50 percent higher than the
average German import price of $11.03 -- and more than 600 percent
higher than the U.S. benchmark Henry Hub price of $2.76 in that year.
Nonetheless, even though exports to Europe will not occur anytime soon
(and possibly never given the prevailing market conditions), globalizing
the market can't hurt over the long term.

Every cubic foot of
US natural gas sold to Japan could, for example, free up another unit of
gas from Qatar or the Middle East to be available for Europe to replace
sources from Russia. In the long run, it never hurts to add to
supplies. In the oil market, we have already seen the advantages that
fracking and other unconventional extraction methods such as oil sands
have provided to the U.S. geopolitical bargaining position. Added
supplies from North Dakota and Alberta, Canada have more than made up
for losses in production due to sanctions on Iran and the freeze on
investment in Venezuela. This has placed enormous pressure on those
regimes as they face reduced export volumes without the price increases
that they rely on for buying the quiescence of their populations.

Diffusion
of fracking technology can also help. It would allow countries in
central Europe tap their own shale gas reserves -- instead of
maintaining or increasing their use of coal, including moist brown coal
or lignite, which is even dirtier, more polluting, and carbon-intensive
than the anthracite black coal we are accustomed to in the United
States.

Finally, such diffusion is likely to make its biggest
impact in the world beyond Europe. The U.S. Energy Information
Administration (EIA) currently estimates that the largest reserves of
shale gas deposits are in neither Europe nor the United States, but in
China. This represents a tremendous opportunity. If natural gas is used
to replace coal in Chinese power generation, the resulting reduction in
greenhouse gas emissions would dwarf any other technologically feasible
step that any single country could take.

So yes, fracking can help save the world -- so long as we are patient enough to see a decade-long process through to its end.

An
increasing number of scientists are worried that global cooling, not
warming, currently poses the greatest threat to life. To register their
growing concerns, scientists are being asked to join a new campaign to
help educate the public and policymakers.icebergs

At the
forefront of the campaign is the Space and Science Research Corporation
(SSRC) of Orlando, Florida, a leading independent US climate research
company. It is the foremost institution in the United States dedicated
to the analysis and planning for the next climate change - forecast to
bring decades of record cold weather.

John L. Casey, SSRC
President says, "The SSRC possesses the capability to conduct planning
and research on how best to prepare individuals, businesses, and
governments at all levels for the next climate change to a period of
long lasting and potentially dangerous colder weather."

Fellow
scientists, unconnected with SSRC, at Principia Scientific International
(PSI) share Casey's concerns. PSI's own independent research supports
the analysis that our planet appears to be entering a prolonged cooling
phase not seen since the Little Ice Age (LIA), a climatically harsh era
that saw untold famine and war during the 17th and 18th Centuries.

It looks like John Kerry’s peace efforts may not garner him a Nobel Prize—so why not try Global Warming?

“The science is unequivocal, and those who refuse to believe it are
simply burying their heads in the sand. We don’t have time for a meeting
anywhere of the Flat Earth Society. And in a sense, climate change can
now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps the
world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” – John Kerry, in
Jakarta on Feb 16, 2014

Our Secretary of State, John Kerry,
sometimes known as “Ketchup Kerry,” has serious ambitions for fame and
fortune. Actually, he has already achieved fortune—by marrying two
wealthy women, the second of which made him a billionaire—with five
residences, a yacht, and a private jet. But fame has eluded him—so far.
Many speculate that he is trying to get the Nobel Peace Prize, like
Barack Obama and Al Gore before him—and PLO terrorist chieftain Yasser
Arafat before them.

One sure way would be arranging a real and
lasting Middle East peace accord between Arabs and Israelis. Good luck
with that! The Palestinians’ popularly elected Hamas government, now
ruling Gaza with an iron hand, has already made it crystal-clear that
they do not want any kind of peace agreement. The other half of the
Palestinian Authority (PA) runs the disputed West-Bank territories,
which Israel captured in a defensive war in 1967. On the West Bank,
there is no elected government; at least there hasn’t been one for many
years. Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), whose term as president of the PA
expired six years ago, does not want to risk an election, which he is
sure to lose to the terrorist Hamas.

Another big hope for Kerry
is to achieve a nuclear breakthrough with Iran. But such a feat is also
likely to elude him, since it seems fairly certain that Iran will break
any agreement in order to build a nuclear weapon.

Never
discouraged, Kerry is also trying to achieve peace in what has become a
civil war in Syria. Not much chance of that, either. Bashir Assad,
backed by Iran and maybe Russia, will never resign as president of
Syria—and the Sunni Moslem majority fighting him is unlikely to give up.
These rebels feel sure that demography will win out in the end—and they
draw major support from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Sunnis elsewhere.

But
ever resourceful, Kerry has now tried a new gambit: Climate Change,
formerly known simply as “Global Warming.” In a heavily publicized
speech in Jakarta, Indonesia, he slammed climate skeptics, labeling them
“deniers,” “shoddy scientists,” likening them to believers in a “flat
earth.” For good measure, he also invoked the phony 97% consensus on
climate science.

However, a survey of more than 1,800 members of
the American Meteorological Society showed that less than half believe
humans are the primary cause of any recent warming. Reviews of published
climate papers by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate
Change (NIPCC) report on thousands of peer-reviewed studies that
contradict the alarmist global-warming narrative; the Chinese Academy of
Sciences has published a condensed version of NIPCC reports. But many
scientific organizations and academies are still sharply split on the
issue of dangerous AGW (anthropogenic global warming).

Clearly,
Kerry is aiming for the big climate meeting in Paris in 2015, which he
hopes will lead to a new Kyoto Protocol. Good luck with that also!
Quoting Dr Charles Battig, “the failed 2010 Kerry-Lieberman ‘American
Power Act’ apparently lives on in Kerry’s psyche.” Also, Kerry seems to
have forgotten, conveniently, that as a Senator in July 1997 he voted
for the anti-Kyoto Byrd-Hagel Resolution. Perhaps someone should remind
him.

Much has changed since 1997; but one constant is that the
proponents of AGW have yet to publish any firm evidence that man-made
CO2 is doing anything dangerous. They hadn’t done it in 1988 when James
Hansen told a Congressional committee that we are headed to disaster;
they hadn’t done it in 1997 when the Kyoto Protocol was signed by almost
200 countries (but never ratified by the US Senate); and they haven’t
done it now.

So the science about global warming cannot be called
“settled.” It no longer supports AGW—if indeed it ever did; in fact,
there has been no significant warming trend for at least 16 years, while
atmospheric carbon dioxide increased by more than 8%. Japan, India, and
Russia are opposed to a new Kyoto Treaty, as are Australia and Canada.
The position of China is enigmatic; apparently, Kerry takes their polite
smiles for assent. But economic considerations, and the need to create
more jobs, dictate further industrial expansion and use of the cheapest
means to create energy: fossil fuels, primarily coal.

So how is
Kerry doing these days? Not at all well on his foreign policy
ventures—and his pronouncements on climate have been ridiculed by most
scientists, except for confirmed “Global Warming Nazis”—to use the label
invented by Dr Roy Spencer.

Kerry’s “flat earth” analogy has
been neatly shot down by Professors Richard McNider and John Christy, of
the University of Alabama. They point out, quite logically, that the
flat earth position was held by the Establishment and that the skeptics
of that time, including Pythagoras, relied on empirical evidence that
the Earth was round. So Kerry has the argument just exactly 180 degrees
wrong.

Kerry also raises the specter that AGW is worse than
weapons of mass destruction (WMD). So how many millions has AGW killed
so far? If truth be told, a slightly warmer climate (since about 1850)
and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have promoted more productive
agriculture and may have saved many millions from starvation. Besides,
the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was warmer than today and permitted a
higher standard of living. It was the Little Ice Age (LIA) that killed
off millions by starvation and disease during 1400-1800.

Two
Democratic lawmakers are defending John Kerry’s remark likening climate
change to a weapon of mass destruction. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.)
and Rep. Henry Waxman (Calif.) said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and
former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) were wrong to criticize Kerry’s
speech on the consequences of climate change. “Secretary Kerry needs
allies in this fight for the future of our planet,” the Democrats wrote
in a letter to McCain and Gingrich. “History will not look back and
fault him for leading the charge to prevent the worst impacts of climate
change while we still have time. But,” they added, “history may
question why Republican leaders who were once their party’s champions on
climate change fled the field at a crucial moment.” Gingrich took to
Twitter and airwaves to call Kerry “delusional” and “dangerous to our
safety.” McCain also faulted Kerry for comparing climate change to
terrorism, poverty and epidemics, asking “on what planet does he
reside?”

[Incidentally, the latest fear imagined by Global
Warming Nazis is the “methane bomb.” They imagine that a warming will
release billions of tons of methane from frozen tundra, and maybe even
from the ocean, causing overwhelming greenhouse warming. However, we can
point to the warmer MWP and the much warmer periods of 5000-8000 years
ago: no such methane release was observed.]

Yet, there are plenty
of controversies left. Scientific supporters of AGW are still working
earnestly, trying to explain the absence of a significant warming trend
of the last 16 years. In the meantime, mischief-makers, actively
promoted by the White House, are trying to blame global warming for
weather disasters. Good examples are the instability of the Polar Vortex
that brought extremely cold weather to the US this past winter—while
Obama has been trying hard to blame the California drought on AGW. In
Britain, chief meteorologist Dame Julia Slingo has blamed the unusual
flooding in southwestern England on AGW. Her views have been disputed by
the UK Met Office; her own scientists have “hung her out to dry.”

Meanwhile,
Algore is still actively promoting AGW—just to show he really earned
his Nobel Peace Prize. At the 20-million-dollar home of Tom Steyer, the
billionaire hedge-fund manager trying to raise 100 million dollars for
AGW propaganda, Gore referred to him as “Mr. Tipping Point.” The group
does not ignore extra-terrestrial concerns about Global Warming. At the
recent annual UFO conference, it was announced that Aliens want a warmer
planet before they will come to Earth. Apparently, they’ve forgotten
the remarkable speech by the late Michael Crichton: “Aliens Cause Global
Warming.”

When it comes to AGW, Kerry is as much of a clown as
Gore—and so is the White House staff. The serious argument now is the
one before the Supreme Court, which has to decide by July whether the
EPA Endangerment Finding (EF) about CO2 can be used to effectively stop
the building of new coal-fired electric plants and even shut down
existing ones. The bad science of the EF will likely be rehashed by the
Court, but there is a little chance of reversing its truly awful 2007
decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, which declared non-toxic and
beneficent CO2 a pollutant. On the contrary, all signs point to the
fulfillment of Obama’s 2008 campaign promise to make electricity prices
“sky-rocket.” How sad.

Natural
gas prices at a four-year high have utilities shifting to coal to
generate 4.519 million megawatt-hours a day, the most since 2011,
government data show. Within three years, coal’s share of power
production could climb to 40.3 percent from about 39 percent last year,
while gas’s share will probably drop to 27 percent from 27.5, the U.S.
Energy Information Administration said.

An arctic blast has
helped put the U.S. on pace for the coldest winter in more than 30 years
through January, prompting utilities to burn more of the less expensive
coal. The U.S. is poised to emit the most carbon dioxide in three
years, undermining President Barack Obama’s efforts to reduce pollution
and steer utilities away from the fossil fuel.

“The idea of coal
disappearing is not an effective climate change policy,” said John
Thompson, an analyst at the Boston-based Clean Air Task Force. “Coal use
is growing.”

Thompson said implementing technology that allows
utilities to capture carbon is better than trying to eliminate coal
because other countries are increasing use of the fuel.

Coal on
the New York Mercantile Exchange has risen 13 percent to $57.58 a ton,
from its 12-month low of $50.84 on Sept. 4. Gas has surged 58 percent to
$5.223 per million British thermal units. Prices reached $5.557 on Jan.
29, the highest since January 2010.

Cold December

Temperatures
during the U.S. heating season, which runs from November to March, have
been below the 20th century average, with December coming in the
coldest since 2009, according to the National Climatic Data Center in
Asheville, North Carolina.

U.S. electricity output in the week
ended Feb. 8 was 11 percent higher than the same week a year earlier,
data from the Edison Electric Institute, a Washington-based group that
represents power companies, show.

That’s helped to push gas
prices up more than 50 percent from a year ago while coal prices have
slipped 1.9 percent during the same period. An average U.S. natural gas
plant can make a profit of $3.04 a megawatt-hour, based on March prices,
compared with a profit of $31.58 for the typical coal-fired generator,
data compiled by Bloomberg show.

The counter argument for coal’s
rebound is that a return of mild winters combined with record gas
production could knock back gas prices, making coal less competitive to
burn, said Lucas Pipes, an analyst at Brean Capital LLC in New York.

Coal’s Command

Coal
commanded 50 percent of total U.S. electricity. generation as recently
as 2005. It sank to a record low of 37 percent in 2012 as gas prices
tumbled to a 10-year low of $1.902 in April of that year.

Hydraulic
fracturing, or fracking, unlocked shale deposits that previously were
uneconomical to produce and helped cause a glut of gas. Mild winters in
2012 and 2013, also contributed to lower utility reliance on coal,
according to Hans Daniels, executive vice president at Doyle Trading
Consultants LLC, a Grand Junction, Colorado-based coal analysis company.

The
utility industry’s turn away from coal swelled stockpiles above 200
million tons in 2012 for just the second time in the last 20 years,
Energy Information Administration data show. Coal stocks have fallen 14
percent through October, the most recent month for which data is
available, according to the government.

Carbon Emissions

As
utilities eat through the excess supply, they set the U.S. on a course
to boost carbon dioxide emissions by 1.2 percent to the highest since
2011, the EIA said in its Feb. 11 Short-Term Energy Outlook.

Burning
coal emits 205.7 pounds of carbon dioxide per million British thermal
units compared with 117 pounds per million Btu for natural gas.

Obama’s
Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, or MATS, will be implemented next
year, forcing older plants to install technology to reduce the
pollutants or retire. In his Jan. 28 State of the Union Address Obama
signaled that he’s prepared to act without Congress to advance parts of
his agenda and said the country has to “act with more urgency” to fight
climate change.

Electricity generation contributed about 39
percent of the U.S.’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2012, government data
show. Still, the country’s efforts to reduce pollution may be muted if
other nation’s increase coal use, said Wyatt King, resident expert on
climate and environmental issues at Washington-based Albright
Stonebridge Group.

Dethroning Oil

Coal is the fastest
growing energy source in the world, rising 2.3 percent a year through
2018, and poised to dethrone crude oil as the largest source by 2020,
the International Energy Agency said in its December Medium-Term Coal
Market Report.

That’s being driven mostly by China, “where coal
is powering an industrial revolution,” Laszlo Varro, head of the
agency’s gas, coal and power markets, said in a Jan. 29 presentation at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The
fuel is also experiencing a resurgence in Europe as the continent’s
economic woes increase its appetite for cheap electricity, he said.

“We
get a sense that coal is backing natural gas out of the stack,” said
Brison Bickerton, head of strategy at Freepoint Commodities LLC in
Stamford, Connecticut. “Coal burn should remain on for some time. Prices
are incentivizing unused coal capacity to come on and back out natural
gas demand.”

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

21 March, 2014

NEW BOOK: CORNUCOPIA: Our Inexhaustible Resources

George Boyce (Author)

Kindle Price: $7.52

Cornucopia
is an optimistic view of the universe we live in and its inexhaustible
resources. We are constantly bombarded with claims of future shortages,
usually food, water, energy and minerals. This has been going on since
humans became sentient, but none of these predictions ever materialise.
Cornucopia examines resources in the light of the past, present and
future, explaining why Malthusian predictions always fail. Ultimately,
when something becomes scarce, we find more of it, substitute one
material for another, or use our own ingenuity to create something
entirely new. By applying our intelligence, creativity, and
ever-improving technology, we have access to effectively unlimited
resources.

In
a column for Scientific American January of last year, Michael Shermer,
the founder of The Skeptics Society, exposed what he calls “The
Liberals’ War on Science.” Shermer observes that, while it is true that
Republicans are more overwhelmingly opposed to well-established
scientific consensus like anthropogenic climate change theory and
evolution, the problem of science denial also reaches epidemic
proportions on the left.

“Try having a conversation with a
liberal progressive about GMOs—genetically modified organisms—,” Shermer
writes, “in which the words “Monsanto” and “profit” are not dropped
like syllogistic bombs.”

Taken only at face value, this seems
fairly innocuous but I offer this riposte: Rick Santorum and his
ilk don’t teach science.

Discovery News, on the other hand, does–
and in June, they posted a YouTube video by Laci Green, a popular
online social justice advocate, feminist and peer sex educator, about
genetically modified organisms. In this video, Laci doesn’t
explicitly state her own opinion with regard to whether or not
genetically modified foods are safe, choosing instead to present
arguments for and against, with a heavy bias against, ending by asking
viewers to post their thoughts on the matter in the comments section
below the video.

This is a clear example of “false balance,” a
tendency for media to overstate controversy in scientific matters.
Fox News has been criticized for this because their coverage of climate
science greatly over-represents those who disagree with anthropogenic
global warming theory while there is a strong consensus among climate
scientists that the theory is correct. As it happens, there is a
similarly strong scientific consensus on the safety of genetically
modified foods, but Laci conveniently ignores it for the sake of
manufactured controversy– and she’s not alone.

SciShow, hosted by
Hank Green, is a YouTube channel with over 1.5 million subscribers
devoted to discussing scientific topics. Last year, Hank posted a
video wherein he discusses genetically modified organisms– what they
are, why they exist, how they’re made, etcetera– which included some
cherry-picked information and outright fabrications about the supposed
dangers of genetic modification, in spite of the existing scientific
consensus to the contrary. It was later removed, and re-uploaded
by another YouTube user– in the comments section there, Hank explains
“We dropped it because we cited studies that have since been
discredited.”

But Hank and Laci Green are just a couple of online personalities– No real harm, right?

Enter
Bill Nye “The Science Guy.” Bill has been, for the most part,
strongly against science denial– he has spoken against teaching
creationism to children as well as climate change denial, but oddly, he
breaks form when the topic is genetically modified organisms.

Let
that sink in for a moment– perhaps the most well-known science
popularizer alive, Bill Nye, trying to scare people into thinking GMOs
are harmful.

That’s a far cry from some preacher doing the same
thing because it conflicts with his religious dogma. It’s science
education programming being used to spread pseudoscience, and the
consequences could be devastating.

Golden rice, a genetically
engineered rice which is rich in beta carotene, was developed to help
curb vitamin A deficiency in the third world, and has been shown as
effective as beta carotene in oil at providing vitamin A. If
policy or activism regarding genetically modified foods were to be based
on the anti-science fear-mongering of people like Bill Nye, it would
hinder efforts to stave off the ailments caused by micronutrient
deficiency in the third world.

According to statistics compiled
by UNICEF, this includes 1-2 million deaths annually of children 1-4
years old that could be averted by improved vitamin A nutritive.

Greenpeace
activists have vandalized testing sites for this potentially life
saving genetically modified rice. Tons of genetically modified
beets have been torched. Greenpeace has also broken into a CSIRO
experimental farm in Australia to destroy genetically modified wheat,
and anti-GMO activists in Hawaii cut down genetically modified papaya
trees during debates about whether or not they would be banned in the
state.

This is the same Greenpeace, by the way, which cites the
broad and overwhelming scientific consensus that exists on the subject
of climate change in support of their environmentalist views.
Science, it seems, only matters when the conclusion is agreeable.

Science
denial also seems to have been quite successful legislatively as of
late, with Kauai and Hawaii’s Big Island each passing their own anti-GMO
bills, heavily Democratic Portland, Oregon voting against fluoridation
in its water, and about 20 states last year considered GMO labeling
mandates, with Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy, a Democrat, signing
one into law.

This is all in addition to the fact that the US
Department of Agriculture’s “organic” certification prohibits the use of
genetically engineered crops– and “organic” food is a 63 billion dollar
industry worldwide, with the US its biggest market.

Furthermore,
several countries ban or heavily regulate GM crops, which is often
cited as a reason the US should institute such regulation– a sort of
pseudoscience positive feedback loop.

Mind you, none of this is
to say that the issue I have been giving the most focus– genetic
engineering– doesn’t have a large body of science deniers on the
right. Rather, the fact that the “pro-science” left has
anti-science voices in its midst lends undue credibility to those
issues. This is not thousands of years of religious tradition
being contradicted by relatively recent scientific discovery, it’s pure
organic bullshit, and it is, right now, costing lives.

The eco-left’s opposition to oil and gas use leaves Ukraine at the mercy of Russia

A
primary duty of a sovereign nation is to put policies in place to
protect the country from both military and economic aggressors.

This
normally includes the creation of a capable military force (and
protective military alliances) and competent economic policies to make
sure the country is not dependent on key resources from or exports to
potential enemies. Ukraine, for a variety of reasons, some outside its
control, violated these defensive principles.

After the breakup
of the old USSR, Ukraine was left with a large nuclear-missile force,
but the country was financially bankrupt. The United States made a deal
with Ukraine to give up all of its nuclear weapons and missiles in
exchange for major financial payments, to allow it to get through an
economic transition period and for a guarantee of future sovereignty.

On
Dec. 5, 1994, the presidents of Ukraine (Leonid Kuchma), Russia (Boris
Yeltsin) and the United States (Bill Clinton), and the prime minister of
the United Kingdom (John Major) signed three memorandums to provide
security assurances to Ukraine, in exchange for Ukraine agreeing to
relinquish its nuclear weapons.

The memorandums read, in part:
Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States “reaffirm their
commitment to Ukraine to respect the independence and sovereignty and
the existing borders of Ukraine reaffirm their obligation to refrain
from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or
political independence of Ukraine to refrain from economic coercion
designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine of
the rights inherent in its sovereignty.”

Russia now stands in
clear violation of the agreement. Other than going to the United Nations
(which the Russians just vetoed), no enforcement mechanism was created
for Ukraine’s protection.

The United States and the United
Kingdom have no military obligation to protect Ukraine, but having
signed the 1994 agreement, they appear to be obligated to take other
actions to try to enforce Ukraine’s borders and independence — which, in
effect, means economic actions that will hurt Russia.

When a
country engages in economic sanctions or other forms of economic
warfare, it must be sure that it will do more damage to its enemy than
itself.

The Russian economy is highly dependent on oil and gas
exports, and reducing Russian oil and gas exports would be the most
direct way to cause pain to the Russian leadership. However, Europe is
heavily dependent on Russian gas and oil, particularly gas.

Six
European Union countries — Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
and Bulgaria — are 100 percent dependent on Russian gas. Poland, the
Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Slovenia and Greece depend on the
Russians for more than 50 percent of their gas.

The countries in
the EU did not need to be in this position, because the EU has plenty of
gas reserves that could be economically tapped using hydraulic
fracturing, or fracking. Because of the environmental lobby, though, the
EU has allowed itself to become dependent on foreign energy sources —
particularly Russian.

Perhaps Peter Foster said it best in The
Financial Post on March 8: “Europe’s alternative-energy policy is in a
shambles. The EU would be even more vulnerable but for a typically
unanticipated example of free-market ingenuity: hydraulic fracturing and
the boom in oil shale gas.

But guess what: Greens are everywhere
resolutely opposed to fracking, and nowhere more than in Europe. [L]ike
their peace march colleagues half a century ago, they are ultimately
dupes for an authoritarian agenda .”

Russia used its natural-gas
supply as a weapon back in 2006 and 2009 when it cut off supply to
Ukraine, which affected the rest of Europe as well. A number of European
leaders are now getting the message and arguing for opening up the EU’s
gas potential — but this is obviously too late to have any impact on
the current crisis — and they are still opposed by the green lobby.

Two
weeks ago, the ambassadors to the United States from Poland, Hungary,
the Czech Republic and Slovakia sent a letter to the U.S. Congress,
asking it to remove export limits and help them buy American natural gas
to reduce their dependence on Russia. Many lawmakers and others have
applauded the idea.

The reality is that the first possible
liquefied natural-gas export terminal at Sabine Pass in the Gulf of
Mexico is still two years away, and others won’t be ready until many
months after that. The Department of Energy has been engaging in
regulation by strangulation.

As John Kemp of Reuters reported on
March 13: “By making regulatory barriers and the permitting process
insurmountable, environmental organizations have been able to stop most
fracking on lands controlled by the U.S. government.”

The result
is that the United States is still dependent on foreign oil and less
able to help supply Europe with various forms of energy — because of
various environmental regulations, which have delayed both the
production and development of the necessary export infrastructure.

Economic
warfare is far preferable to military warfare, but economic warfare
requires that those who engage in it are not dependent on the enemy for
needed raw materials, energy or markets. Europe is dependent on Russia
for all three — and America has so hobbled itself that it cannot bail
out Europe. Poor Ukraine, poor Europe, poor America.

Richard W. Rahn is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Glob

End this obsession over climate change: It stops us tackling floods and storms now say British experts

Obsessing over climate change is distracting politicians from dealing with floods and storms, experts warned yesterday.

Trying to link all extreme weather to man-made global warming ‘has been a social and policy disaster’, they said.

Instead,
the focus should shift towards dealing with the impact of fierce
weather, which will happen regardless of climate change, argued
David Schultz and Vladimir Jankovic.

The academics from the
University of Manchester said flood defences must be given greater
priority to avoid a repeat of the impact of this winter’s storms.

In
a paper published last night, they said the Government was too focused
on cutting greenhouse gases, which was crucial but would never
eliminate devastating floods or powerful tidal surges.

Senior politicians have been eager to link Britain’s severe floods to global warming.

The
Prime Minister said man-made climate change was ‘one of the most
serious threats’ the country faced and that he ‘very much suspected’ it
caused the floods in Somerset and along the Thames Valley.

Labour
leader Ed Miliband has described global warming as ‘an issue of
national security’ which would bring ‘more flooding, more storms’.

And
UN executive Christiana Figueres prompted fury when she said the floods
had a ‘silver lining’ as they forced climate change on to the political
agenda.

But Professor Schultz, an expert in meteorology, and Dr
Jankovic, a climate historian, said that it was almost impossible to
link any one weather event to global warming.

Trying to do so was ‘a distraction’, they wrote in the journal Weather, Climate and Society.

Linking
‘climate change and high-impact weather events, although an interesting
scientific question, has been a social and policy disaster’, they
added.

‘The over-emphasis on “was this associated with climate
change?” distracts from the issue that weather happens whether or not
climate change is occurring.

‘For most purposes, any change due to climate change is a less immediate concern than the impact of the weather itself.

'Society ought to do its best to protect the planet but society should also protect itself against weather disasters.’

Politicians wrongly thought cutting greenhouse gas emissions should be the main response, the authors said.

They
said this was important but governments should also focus on measures
such as building flood defences. But Bob Ward, policy director at the
London School of Economics Grantham Institute said talking about climate
change was vital.

‘Frankly it is dangerous to suggest that all we need to do is make ourselves resilient to weather extremes,’ he added.

It was important ‘the public understands climate change is already occurring and the scale of the risk is huge’, he said.

Dr
Saleemul Huq, of the International Institute for Environment and
Development, agreed extreme weather was likely with or without climate
change.

‘But I also think there is a strong case that such events may become more extreme due to climate change,’ he added.

The
Manchester paper comes a week before the latest report from the UN on
climate change. Leaked drafts predict that the changing climate will
cause severe flooding globally.

Chancellor George Osborne
announced an extra £140million for flood schemes in his Budget but this
was dismissed as grossly insufficient by engineers.

The
American Physical Society has been amongst the loudest alarmist
organisations whipping up hysteria about CO2, but a review of its
position that has placed three sceptics on the six-member investigatory
panel strongly suggests the tide has turned

The 50,000-strong
American body of physicists, the American Physical Society (APS), seems
to be turning significantly sceptical on climate alarmism.

The
same APS put out a formal statement in 2007 adding its voice to the
alarmist hue and cry. That statement caused resignations of some of its
top physicists (including 1973 Nobel Prize winner Ivar Giaever and Hal
Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa
Barbara).[1] The APS was forced by 2010 to add some humiliating
clarifications but retained the original statement that the evidence for
global warming was ‘incontrovertible’.

By its statutes, the APS
must review such policy statements each half-decade and that scheduled
review is now under way, overseen by the APS President Malcolm Beasley.

The
review, run by the society’s Panel on Public Affairs, includes four
powerful shocks for the alarmist science establishment.[3]

First,
a sub-committee has looked at the recent 5th Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and formulated scores of
critical questions about the weak links in the IPCC’s methods and
findings. In effect, it’s a non-cosy audit of the IPCC’s claims on which
the global campaign against CO2 is based.

Second, the APS
Panel’s review sub-committee, after ‘consulting broadly’, appointed a
workshop to get science input into the questions. The appointed
workshop of six expert advisers, amazingly, includes three eminent
sceptic scientists: Richard Lindzen, John Christy, and Judith Curry. The
other three members comprise long-time IPCC stalwart Ben Santer (who,
in 1996, drafted, in suspicious circumstances, the original IPCC mantra
about a “discernible” influence of manmade CO2 on climate), an IPCC lead
author and modeler William Collins, and atmospheric physicist Isaac
Held.

Third, the sub-committee is ensuring the entire process is
publicly transparent — not just the drafts and documents, but the
workshop discussions, which have been taped, transcribed and officially
published, in a giant record running to 500+ pages.[4]

Fourth, the APS will publish its draft statement to its membership, inviting comments and feedback.

What
the outcome will be, ie what the revised APS statement will say, we
will eventually discover. It seems a good bet that the APS will
break ranks with the world’s collection of peak science bodies,
including the Australian Academy of Science, and tell the public, softly
or boldly, that IPCC science is not all it’s cracked up to be.

The
APS audit of the IPCC makes a contrast with the Australian Science
Academy’s (AAS) equivalent efforts. In 2010 the AAS put out a booklet,
mainly for schools, ”The Science of Climate Change, Questions and
Answers”, drafted behind closed doors. The drafters and overseers
totalled 16 people, and the original lone sceptic, Garth Paltridge, was
forced out by the machinations of then-President Kurt Lambeck.

The
Academy is currently revising the booklet, without any skeptic input at
all. Of the 16 drafters and overseers, at least nine have been IPCC
contributors and others have been petition-signing climate-policy
lobbyists, hardly appropriate to do any arm’s length audit of the IPCC
version of the science. Once again, the process is without any public
transparency or consulting with the broad membership.

Two
little essays, both published on The Conversation (13 and 14 March*),
and a compilation of surveys, provide the basis for this post. I’ll
start with the surveys first, which come courtesy of Donna Laframboise,
who has written an amusing little piece on surveys about ‘climate
change’. Imagine, she asks, that you are on a transcontinental rail
journey. You go to eat in the buffet car, and at every meal you are
asked what you would like — but, whatever you ask for, the food is
always vegetarian. She says opinion surveys and political oratory about
global warming are like that.

American surveys routinely place
global warming or ‘climate change’ last in the list of important issues,
so far as the electorate is concerned, and the same is largely true
both of the UK, and of the United Nations’ own global surveys. In
Australia the poll evidence is that Australians are more concerned than
Americans, but there are no truly equivalent poll results. Ms
Laframboise points out that despite this lack of interest, politicians
and the ‘concerned’ go on telling us that we are wrong: we should be
concerned like them, and must be deficient in sense and altruism for not
being so. She lists Secretary of State John Kerry as a Cassandra
example, pointing to the same speech that I wrote about three weeks ago.

So
the orthodox go on waiting impatiently for the warming to return, and
becoming even louder and more aggressive in their contempt for those of
us who ask for good argument and good data and point out what seem to be
problems in the orthodoxy. The decline in interest in AGW is certainly
connected to the lack of significant warming to match the increase in
carbon dioxide, but there is a lot more to it, I think. So to the first
of these articles, which is by Rod Lamberts, Deputy Director of
the ANU’s National Centre for Public Awareness of Science. What do you
think of this?

The fact is that the time for fact-based arguments
is over. We all know what the overwhelmingly vast majority of climate
science is telling us. I’m not going to regurgitate the details here, in
part because the facts are available everywhere, but more importantly,
because this tactic is a core reason why climate messages often don’t
resonate or penetrate. If, like me, you’re convinced that human activity
is having a hugely damaging effect on the global climate, then your
only responsible option is to prioritise action.

I don’t think
that what he proposes is at all a ‘responsible option’. The most
responsible surely would be to look hard at what you think are the
facts. Like Bernie Fraser, however, of whom he speaks well in this
essay, Mr Lamberts knows what ‘the vast majority of climate science’ is
telling him, though he won’t tell his readers. I’m certainly not sure
what it is, and I think by now I have a reasonable understanding of ‘the
science’. We don’t need any more facts, he says, we need action. Nor is
it clear what sort of action he has in mind, other than noisy
behaviour. But then we get this: What we need now is to become
comfortable with the idea that the ends will justify the means.

That
really worries me, and it should worry anyone. That is not how
democracies should behave, and indeed it is what people object to about
people who think they know The Truth: they are always telling the rest
of us what to do. Mr Lamberts says that deniers should just be
disregarded. Ignore them, step around them, or walk over them. I
object to this sort of talk, especially from an academic at the ANU,
from which I have my PhD. It is stormtrooper stuff, and has no place
either in universities or in a website funded by universities.

The
second essay is by Lawrence Torcello, an American academic who teaches
philosophy in the USA. It is not in any way a sensible article, and
while I wonder why it was accepted for publication in Australia it is
certainly another good illustration of the aggressive style which you
can find from the ‘believers’. Here is a sample:

We have good
reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and
morally negligent. The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to
extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as
part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of
scientific consensus… What are we to make of those behind the well
documented corporate funding of global warming denial? Those who
purposefully strive to make sure “inexact, incomplete and contradictory
information” is given to the public? I believe we understand them
correctly when we know them to be not only corrupt and deceitful, but
criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life. It is
time for modern societies to interpret and update their legal systems
accordingly.

Nowhere in this is any attempt to define anything;
apparently it’s not needed by philosophers like Mr Torcello, though I
would have thought ‘climate denial’ at least needs some kind of
explanation if funding it is to be regarded as criminal behaviour. As
I’ve said a few times, I am simply unaware of any funding that flows to
me or to the others with whom I discuss AGW. Nor can I see any
‘sustained campaign to undermine the the public’s understanding of
scientific consensus’. What does Mr Torcello have in mind?

No
matter. Any innocent reading this will come away with the view that
‘climate deniers’, whoever they are, should be jailed. It’s different
stormtrooper talk, and just as objectionable. Neither Lamberts nor
Torcello deserves much respect, on the evidence of these essays, but I
put to them that it is indeed time for a debate, a real debate, the kind
that I mentioned in my piece on Bernie Fraser last week. The more they
denounce citizens who ask questions about ‘climate change’ the weaker
their position becomes. Let us discuss these ‘facts that are available
everywhere’, and in public. And soon.

A good comment by Colin Davidson that appeared on Don's site below the article above:

Don,

I
think you have done a great service by drawing attention to academics
wanting, nay advocating, the shutting down of free speech, and the
sanctioning of anyone who dares to oppose their own beliefs.

And I
would also add that skeptics in general, and I in particular, do not
want to stop the proponents of action from having their say. The nasty
sentminent that opponents must be coerced into agreement is coming
almost wholly from the proponents of action. Dictators to a man. Lovers
of concentration/extermination camps. Nazis.

There is no other
way to say it. That group represents a group which does not believe in
the rule of law, freedom of speech, or freedom of the press. It believes
in slavery for us all, and is working hard to achieve that.

Cut
their funding, I say. I'm happy for them to be whackos, play with their
doodles, boil their sweets. But not on the public purse. Let them exist
on the funding that skeptics receive - as I think Jo Nova pointed out
skeptics receive very little funding, and certaimnly no public monies.
On the orther side there are vast rivers of Government Gold pouring into
the coffers and funding halfwits like the two turkeys you mention.

Let
them fund their beliefs by themselves. I hate it that my taxes are
going to academics who, rather than being seekers after the truth, are
just ill-educated, lazy thinkers, full of themselves up to the hilt.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

20 March, 2014

Déjà Vu All Over Again: UN Climate Talks In Bonn Fail

The latest round of UN Climate Talks in Bonn have failed with the usual lack of trust between the parties.

The
UN Climate Circus met in Bonn, Germany last week, though with the
exception of dedicated Green news outlets and blogs the whole event
passed with no main stream media attention, such is the state of global
warming fear fatigue these days.

The divisions are along the
usual lines of who will cut emissions and by how much, the lack of
contributions from the so called rich countries to the Green Climate
Fund and Loss and Damage, more commonly known as wealth redistribution.

Loss
and Damage was the reason that COP19 was dead in the water, even before
it had started. Barack Obama instructed US Climate Envoys prior to
COP19 that giving away trillions of dollars for years to pay for the
guilt of being an industrialized nation would not “float with the
voters.”

A few months on little has changed as the latest round of UN climate talks achieved nothing:

Levels
of trust between leading developing countries and the USA and EU member
states appears to have hit a new low after a week of UN climate talks
in Bonn.

India, China and 24 other countries in the Like-Minded
Developing Countries (LDMC) group say the brunt of greenhouse gas cuts
must be made by industrialised countries.

The US, EU and
Switzerland say the global climate deal scheduled to be agreed in Paris
next year will only work if all countries make commitments, which they
say was agreed in 2011 in Durban.

The problem with who cuts CO2
emissions goes like this, the LDMC group say that the countries who have
historically emitted the most CO2 must bear the brunt of emissions
reductions, other factions including the industrialized world say the
cuts must be based on current CO2 emissions.

The objective of the
Bonn meeting was to do ground work on how a Climate deal at COP21 Paris
in 2015 could work, instead the meeting quickly broke down into
fractious exchanges between delegates.

Switzerland’s Ambassador
for the Environment Franz Perrez told RTCC “dogmatic views such as all
Annexe 2 have to pay, and it’s only them to have to pay” are preventing
the talks from progressing.

He said climate vulnerable countries
such as the Philippines should disassociate themselves with the LDMC
group, which he accused of trying to slow the talks.

Perrez said:
“I do not understand, if you look at what the position of the
Philippines should be, they should not defend the interest of China, of
India, of Singapore, of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, so it’s surprising
how they are arguing in favour of maintaining a regime that is not in
their advantage.”

The UN backed Green Climate Fund (GCF) is still
struggling for money and there is a GCF board meeting scheduled for May
to decide how to distribute the money, always assuming that the GCF
board members have decided whether to fly First or Business Class to
Bali for the meeting.

The delivery of extra flows of finance –
long the subject of bitter exchanged between countries – is likely to
depend on when the UN-backed Green Climate Fund comes online.

In 2009 rich nations committed to supplying $100 billion a year by 2020, and delivered $30 billion between 2010-2012.

The
world is a far apart as ever, a fact we should all be thankful for,
from agreeing a climate deal that would spell disaster for civilization
as we know it.

Heads of state in the democratic industrialized
world know that they can never sell the idea to voters of declining
living standards and giving away billions of pounds, dollars, euros et
al to the developing world.

Little wonder then that the head of
the UNFCCC, Christiana Figueres thinks that dictatorship and communism
are the best forms of government to force Agenda 21 through.

When
President Barack Obama hired John Podesta, an outspoken
environmentalist who opposes the Keystone XL pipeline, as his special
adviser late last year, many environmentalists anticipated that they
were getting a strong ally in the West Wing.

Maybe so. But on
Wednesday, Mr. Podesta showed that he’s not afraid to push back at
environmental groups when he feels they’re going too far.

“If you
oppose all fossil fuels and you want to turn fossil fuels off tomorrow,
that’s a completely impractical way to move toward a clean-energy
future,” Mr. Podesta said at a briefing with reporters on a climate data
initiative. His comments came in response to questions about a letter
that 17 environmental groups sent to Mr. Obama on Tuesday urging him to
oppose the exports of natural gas to other countries.

“With all
due respect to my friends in the environmental community, if they expect
us to turn off the lights and go home, that’s an impractical
suggestion,” he said.

This isn’t the first time Mr. Podesta has
tangled with environmental groups over climate change. Earlier this year
he questioned a letter sent from a broader set of environmental groups
urging the administration to drop its “all of the above” energy strategy
that embraces fossil fuels.

The latest conflict is more focused
on natural gas, specifically exporting it. The Tuesday letter was
organized in part by the Sierra Club and 350.org, two groups integral in
the fight against Keystone XL pipeline, who are opposed to an export
facility in Maryland. They asked the administration to conduct a broader
review of it.

While rebuffing the opponents of natural gas,
though, Mr. Podesta also said the administration was close to finalizing
rules for controlling methane—a greenhouse gas that comes from
natural-gas emissions.

“We are in the throes of finalizing a
methane strategy across the government,” Mr. Podesta said to reporters
in a roundtable meeting at the White House. “You can expect an
announcement in the not too distant future.” He didn’t elaborate more on
details of the strategy. Mr. Obama first announced the intent to create
such a strategy at his climate-change speech in June.

Mr.
Podesta’s dual comments showed the White House’s efforts to thread the
needle on natural gas by embracing its use while also regulating its
emissions. It is the cleanest-burning fossil fuel, emitting 50% less
carbon than coal and 30% less that of oil and has helped the country cut
its greenhouse-gas emissions to levels not seen the 1990s. But the
primary component of the fuel—methane—is a greenhouse gas at least 25
times more potent than carbon, meaning its impact warming the planet’s
atmosphere occurs in a shorter time frame than carbon.

As the
country’s production of natural gas has soared to record levels in the
past few years, environmental scrutiny of the fuel has similarly risen.
Environmentalists are worried that too much methane is inadvertently
being released during the production and transmission of the fuel.
Comprehensive, up-to-date data on just how much methane is leaking is
lagging, which feeds the conflict.

“The [methane] emissions are
definitely big enough to be worth reducing, but they’re not big enough
to [negate] the advantage of natural gas over coal as a way to generate
electricity,” said John Holdren, the director of the White House’s
office of science and technology.

The Environmental Protection
Agency in 2012 finalized air-pollution standards that indirectly cuts
methane emissions, but no federal rule exists that targets methane
specifically. Mr. Podesta did say that earlier on Wednesday he attended a
meeting hosted by Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz on this issue, which
included participants from both energy industry and the environmental
community.

“We remain committed to developing the resource and
using it, and we think there is an advantage, particularly in the
electricity generation,” said Mr. Podesta, who founded and was
previously chair of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress.
He said Wednesday he spends about 50% of his time on climate issues.

"Climate
change" historically polls very low, so the Republicans seem not to
have noticed that an attack on the American energy revolution is going
to be a hot political issue in at least the 2014 elections and probably
2016 as well.

Liberal activist groups have noticed, though, and
are raising money, flexing for a game of hardball, already sitting on a
win, and setting their sights on a complete victory.

In
mid-February, billionaire and major Democratic National Committee donor
Tom Steyer held a dinner at his palatial San Francisco home for 70 of
his closest friends.

Former Vice President Al Gore was the
headliner, and in attendance were Democratic Sens. Harry Reid of Nevada,
Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, Jeanne
Shaheen of New Hampshire, Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland and Mark Udall
of Colorado.

Also present was Democratic Rep. Gary Peters, who
is running for an open Senate seat in Michigan. League of Conservation
Voters President Gene Karpinski and former Sierra Club President Carl
Pope circulated among the guests. The event raised more than $400,000
for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

February was a
busy month for Mr. Steyer. Early on, he held a similar event for other
Democrat high rollers at his ranch in Pescadero, Calif. The New York
Times published a long feature on Mr. Steyer that appeared above the
fold on the front page.

National Public Radio broadcast an
interview, and the usual liberal publications such as Politico ran
features on him and his plans.

What has everyone's attention is
this number: $100 million. Mr. Steyer has announced that he intends to
put $50 million of his own money into Democrats' races in 2014 and has
challenged his fellow deep-pocket liberals to match it with an
additional $50 million of their own.

His issue is "climate
change," which conservatives correctly recognize as the suppression of
fossil-fuel production, particularly shale oil.

Mr. Steyer has
certainly demonstrated that he can put his money where his mouth is.
With an estimated family wealth of at least $1.5 billion, he has long
been a generous donor to liberal and Democratic Party causes.

A
short surf through the Federal Election Commission website reveals more
than $1.1 million of soft-money donations in his own name to liberal
groups, and page after page of direct contributions to individual
Democratic candidates and Democratic Party organizations adding up to
almost another million dollars.

Other Steyer family members
living in the San Francisco Bay area, including his older brother James,
seem to be almost as generous. Counting the soft-money and the
hard-money campaign contributions from the Steyer family that we know
about, it would certainly add up to high tens of millions of dollars at
least.

It's
been a brutal winter for many, and winter refuses to loosen its grip on
a good chunk of the country even as spring rapidly approaches. But
despite what climate alarmists want you to believe, this season's
bone-chilling cold wasn't and isn't some fluke; in fact, according to
Meteorologist Joe D'Aleo, average temperatures across the United States
in the December-February period have dropped by 2.26 degrees Fahrenheit
over the last two decades based on data from the National Climate Data
Center. This occurred despite some notably warm winters. Call us crazy,
but that sure doesn't sound like global warming to us; in fact, Earth as
a whole hasn't experienced any warming for more than 17 years. No
wonder they're now calling it "climate change."

Here
is the CONUS trend for the last 20 years, down 2.26F (1.13F per
decade). This is the trend from NCDC for the period 1995-2014. The base
period is the conventional last 3 complete decades -1981-2010

It
is being widely predicted that George Osborne may decide to abandon any
further increases in the Carbon Price Floor, introduced in April 2013. [Now confirmed]

Any freeze in the tax could cut as much as £50 from consumer bills by 2020.

Meanwhile, a BBC survey has suggested that energy bills are the biggest worry for households.

The
Carbon Price Floor (CPF) is designed to penalise companies who create
pollution, and to encourage investment in green energy.

The
merits of freezing the tax have been advocated by an unusual array of
allies, including the CBI, manufacturers' organisation the EEF, energy
suppliers and consumer groups including Which? and Consumer Futures.

However,
those in favour of more investment in green energy are likely to be
disappointed. Environmentalists say it could mean fewer wind turbines or
solar farms being constructed.

The Carbon Price Floor (CPF)
ensures that polluters pay a minimum price for the gas or fossil fuels
they burn. In effect, it is a surcharge on the European Emissions
Trading Scheme (EETS), which was designed to tax polluters across the
EU.

However, the market price of the right to emit carbon has
fallen so much that the EETS is no longer as strong a disincentive to
pollute as it was.

But the implementation of the CPF has left
many big British companies paying more in tax than their counterparts
elsewhere in the EU.

Last year, the CPF added £5 to a typical UK energy bill, according to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).

But as the tax is due to be ramped up over the next few years, so too is the contribution from consumers.

"The
Carbon Price Floor is set to become a bigger and unnecessary burden on
struggling consumers in coming years and we think it should be
scrapped," said Richard Lloyd, the executive director of Which?

A BBC survey, meanwhile, has suggested that energy bills are the top worry for consumers.

The
survey, conducted by ComRes for BBC Breakfast, concluded that more
people worry about paying utility bills or council tax than any other
household expenditure.

The cost of food came second, with the cost of petrol and diesel in third place.

More than a quarter of people questioned said their financial situation was causing them stress.

Aussie
skeptics say they have one of their nation’s top climate alarmist
professors cornered in an ongoing battle of words over who holds the
high ground on scientific integrity. Scientist, Dr Judy Ryan and her
colleague, Dr Marjory Curtis are going public with a series of damning
emails they’ve had with government-backed promoters of fears about
man-made global warming.

Their latest target is Professor David
Karoly, a climatologist who they claim dishonestly championed a
government campaign to depict human carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions as
black smoke, contrary to scientific fact.

Dr Ryan reports, “On
18th February 2014 I sent an email to David Karoly with Marjory Curtis, a
retired geologist, as my co-signer. Approximately 180 australian and
overseas media outlets, politicians, universities, including their
student newspapers, and prominent climate hysteria mongers were openly
copied in.”

Ryan and Curtis are among many highly-qualified
scientists who, as skeptics of the wrong-headed hysteria over supposed
man-made global warming, are fighting to restore scientific integrity.

Dr
Curtis says Karoly’s “error” over the CO2 as black smoke “may have been
a fortuitous oversight” for the cause of alarmists who some say are
trying to dupe the public on the issue.

Judy Curtis has advised
Karoly all the correspondence, because of its significance to public
policy, will be published as open letters. She says, “We replied 21st
February and added in our fellow skeptics. So there are now close to 220
observers for Karoly’s next response. To date we have not heard back,
but it is early days yet.”

The first letter and Karoly’s immediate response are below.

As
with many independent scientists frustrated with the apparent bias of
government climatologists, Ryan understands that such public emails are
becoming a powerful tool and she provides many helpful tips on how to
formulate and send them. She tells readers “Feel free to copy, paste and
use them, and if you have questions you only need to ask.”

18th February 2014

Dear Professor Karoly,

We
have been writing to you for a year requesting that you provide one
credible study that supports your hypothesis of catastrophic, human
caused global warming (CAGW). You have not been able to provide one.
The letters and your responses are all on the public record
https://www.facebook.com/DavidKarolyEmailThread?ref=hl

In March
2013 we issued you the opportunity to either renounce your alarmist
claims on the ABC news, or publicly provide empirical data-based
evidence, that is available for scientific scrutiny, to support them.

Almost a year has passed and still you have not provided the evidence.

We
remind you that the Australian people are experiencing financial
disadvantage as a result of the host of policies and administrative
decisions driven by advice regarding the science of climate change. Is
that advice false or misleading? Does it deceive by concealing or
omitting or embellishing or misrepresenting relevant facts?

The
definition of fraud is, according to Black’s Law Dictionary, quote: “a
false representation of a matter of fact, whether by words or by
conduct, by false or misleading allegations, or by concealment of that
which should have been disclosed, which deceives and is intended to
deceive another so that he shall act upon it to his legal injury.”

According
to Malcolm Roberts author of the CSIROh! report
http://www.conscious.com.au/CSIROh%21.html , you are prominently
involved in many taxpayer-funded climate bodies fomenting unfounded
climate alarm. One of your roles is that you are Editor-In-Chief of the
Bureau of Meteorology’s (BOM’s) in-house journal. On page 10 of his
report’s Appendix 7, Malcolm Roberts cites Peter Bobroff’s analysis,
quote: “Publishing the research. The Bureau of Meteorology has its own
in-house journal: the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic
Journal (prev Aust. Meteorol. Mag.). The editor-in-chief responsible for
the defence of the scientific method, elimination of all types of bias,
automatic release of all relevant data and code is none other than
David Karoly – the strident proponent of human causation of future
catastrophic global warming. The BOM itself has taken a strong partisan
position on the subject.”

According to their
website you also appear to be BOM’s principal author. Graphs on the
following pages were obtained or produced by various independents
non-aligned examiners and auditors of BOM records. Are you are the
author of the original regional temperature data or graphs used by BOM?

Every
graph shows that the raw data, which shows either a flat or downward
(cooling) trend has been “adjusted” to a warming trend. Are you
are associated in any way with producing BOM’s adjusted graphs? If so,
in our opinion it is very misleading of both you and the BOM personnel
to adjust the data to the extent that it misrepresents reality. We also
think that it is very misleading of both you and BOM to omit to
declare to the Australian people that you have “adjusted” the raw
data.

Under Australia’s strong democracy no one is above the law.
Judges, politicians, scientists, academics, senior public servants, and
managing directors can be held to account for breaching their fiduciary
duty.

It seems that you have prominent roles across many
taxpayer-funded entities promoting unfounded and unscientific claims of
anthropogenic global warming and contradicting empirical scientific
evidence. Your many prominent roles place you at the hub of the web of
such agencies. You have thereby positioned yourself perfectly for
answering our fundamental and straight-forward questions. As taxpayers
and concerned scientists we look forward to your evidence based
response. It is not a good look if you do not acknowledge this very
public letter.

In closing, if there is anything we have said that
you think is untrue please click reply all and let us know and we will
apologise.

Dr Judy Ryan

Dr Marjorie Curtis

David Karoly clicked “Reply All” and sent this email within 24 hours.

On 19 Feb 2014, at 6:11 am, David John Karoly wrote:

Hi Judy,

It's interesting to receive another of your emails as they keep me amused.

If
you are so convinced that I have committed fraud, I recommend that you
pass the evidence to my employer, the University of Melbourne; the major
funder of my research, the Australian Research Council, and to the
police. In the past, your claims have been considered and dismissed, as
have those from Malcolm Roberts. I am sure that you will find that
further evidence of a conspiracy.

All the evidence of the human
causes of global warming is assessed thoroughly in the 5th assessment
report of the IPCC, Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis,
available at http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/

The specific chapter on human causation, Chapter 10 Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional

Is available at http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_Chapter10_FINAL.pdf

No doubt you will again refuse to accept this evidence.

I have no idea what you mean when you state "you also appear to be BOM’s principal author".

I am not "the author of the original regional temperature data or graphs used by BOM".

I
recommend that you contact the Bureau of Meteorology or look carefully
at their web site for the sources of their data and the reasons for the
adjustments to minimise inhomogeneities.

As always, I keep your emails and refer them to the legal office at the University of Melbourne.

David Karoly

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Prof David Karoly

School of Earth Sciences

University of Melbourne, VIC 3010, AUSTRALIA

ph: +61 3 8344 xxxx

fax: +61 3 8344 xxxx

email: dkaroly@xxxxxx.auhttp://www.researcherid.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Judy Ryan ;

Subject: [execnzcsc] Re: Do These Temperature Graphs Represent Reality? That is the Question

Date: 21 February 2014 10:29:49 am AEDT

To: David John Karoly ;Dear Professor Karoly, and about 220 other observers

————————————————

Dear Professor Karoly,

Thank you for your prompt reply.

I
have included other scientists, including past and present IPCC
reviewers in this reply to you. These scientists are much more
conversant with the Working Group Ones final, final report than either
Dr Curtis or I. But, I assure you I have read Working Group Ones
final draft report, which was released to the public as an unapproved
draft. Dr Curtis and I will be looking and learning as we see the
evidence from the final, final report unfold.

In your
response below you have stated that you are not the author of the
original BOM temperature graphs. But, you have not answered the second
part of the question.

It is an honest, straightforward, legitimate question.

Professor Karoly, are you the author of the BOM’s adjusted/homogenised graphs shown below?

Please click Reply All and answer the question.

We look forward to your prompt response.

Respectfully yours

Dr Judy Ryan

Dr Marjorie Curtis

P.S.
Dr Curtis and I will appreciate your courtesy in addressing both
of us in your correspondence. Marjory has been an active skeptic
for more than three decades, and as many of her students know, she is a
force to be reckoned with.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

19 March, 2014

CFC quack singing an old song

Below
is an attempt to leverage off the prestige of an earlier Greenie
hero. Everything he says is Greenie boilerplate and mostly
wrong. But his claim to fame is his theory that CFCs caused the
ozone hole in Antarctica. But both fact and theory have since
demolished that theory. CFC reduction has not led to the hole
shrinking and "Our understanding of chloride chemistry has really been blown apart" by recent findings. So the Warmists are relying on a man who was demonstrably wrong before

Early
in his career, a scientist named Mario J. Molina was pulled into
seemingly obscure research about strange chemicals being spewed into the
atmosphere. Within a year, he had helped discover a global
environmental emergency, work that would ultimately win a Nobel Prize.

Now,
at 70, Dr. Molina is trying to awaken the public to an even bigger
risk. He spearheaded a committee of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society,
which released a stark report Tuesday on global warming.

The
report warns that the effects of human emissions of heat-trapping gases
are already being felt, that the ultimate consequences could be dire,
and that the window to do something about it is closing.

“The
evidence is overwhelming: Levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
are rising,” says the report. “Temperatures are going up. Springs are
arriving earlier. Ice sheets are melting. Sea level is rising. The
patterns of rainfall and drought are changing. Heat waves are getting
worse, as is extreme precipitation. The oceans are acidifying.”

And
the association does not plan to stop with the report. The group, with a
membership of 121,200 scientists and science supporters around the
world, plans a broad outreach campaign to put forward accurate
information in simple language.

The scientists are essentially trying to use their powers of persuasion to cut through public confusion over this issue.

Polls
show that most Americans are at least somewhat worried about global
warming. But people generally do not understand that the problem is
urgent — that the fate of future generations (not necessarily that far
in the future) is being determined by emission levels now. Moreover, the
average citizen tends to think there is more scientific debate about
the basics than there really is.

The report emphasizes that the
experts have come to a consensus, with only a few dissenters. “Based on
well-established evidence, about 97 percent of climate scientists have
concluded that human-caused climate change is happening,” it says.

That
is not the same as claiming that all questions about climate change
have been answered. In fact, enormous questions remain, and the science
of global warming entails a robust, evolving discussion.

The new
report walks through a series of potential consequences of planetary
warming, without asserting that any is sure to happen. They are
possibilities, not certainties, and the distinction is crucial for an
intelligent public debate about what to do. The worst-case forecasts
include severe food shortages as warming makes it harder to grow crops;
an accelerating rise of the sea that would inundate coastlines too
rapidly for humanity to adjust; extreme heat waves, droughts and floods;
and a large-scale extinction of plants and animals.

“What’s
extremely clear is that there’s a risk, a very significant risk,” Dr.
Molina said by telephone from Mexico, where he spends part of his time.
“You don’t need 100 percent certainty for society to act.”

NOTE:
Molina is in any case far from impartial. He is the director of
the Climate Leadership Corps, a member of WWF-México’s Senior
Advisory Council and was a member of the IAC Panel, charged with
assessing the IPCC. He also just happened to be a review editor for IPCC
AR4 WG1 ch 7, a drafting author for AR4 WG1 Summary for Policy Makers
and a Lead Author of the Technical Summary

Did the Romans produce wine in Cambridge? 2,000-year-old irrigation system for vineyards unearthed on farmland

More
evidence of the Roman warm period. Only modern viticultural
techniques enable wine grapes to be grown in Britain today and even then
the vines are in the South

The earliest example of Roman
irrigation in Britain, dating back almost 2,000 years, has been
discovered in Cambridge - and it may have been used to produce wine.

A
network of ditches and ridges was found on the site of a proposed new
£1 billion development on farmland at the edge of the town, near the
M11.

Researchers believe the channels were used as a vineyard, or
to grow asparagus, and are being hailed as evidence of 'intense
agriculture' dating back to around 70AD.

Historians have long
suspected the 370-acre (150 hectare) site could have been home to an
ancient Roman settlement. Archaeologists were invited to explore
the site 18 months ago before work begins on the major new development
of housing, shops and a new school.

Team leader Chris Evans said it was evidence of an ‘intense agricultural regime’ dating as far back as 70AD.

‘Our
findings from excavating around the ridgeway have unearthed zebra-like
stripes of Roman planting beds that are encircled on their higher
northern side by more deep pit-wells,’ continued Evans.

‘The gully-defined planting beds were closely set and were probably grapevines or possibly asparagus.

The
world isn’t warming. The Climate Depot website obtained the latest
satellite measurements and found the Earth’s thermostat hasn’t budged
since September 1996.

That’s 210 straight months without any
trend of the planet growing hotter, or colder, by even a tenth of a
degree. This ought to be good news for buyers of a Toyota Prius or
carbon-dioxide offsets. They could imagine themselves as having saved
the world. But they’re more depressed than ever.

Matthew Ranson,
an economist, describes in the Journal of Environmental Economics and
Management the chaos that he thinks awaits. “Between 2010 and 2099,” he
writes in the peer-reviewed journal, “climate change will cause an
additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 cases of rape, 1.2 million aggravated
assaults, 2.3 million simple assaults, 260,000 robberies, 1.3 million
burglaries, 2.2 million cases of larceny, and 580,000 cases of vehicle
theft in the United States.” No estimates of mopery or pillaging.

Mr.
Ranson said he examined the effect that temperature has on crime rates,
based on FBI records. The numbers recognize the obvious criminal
preference to rob and pillage in balmy conditions; a blizzard is bad for
everybody’s business.

He speculates that a great crime wave
would follow the heat wave predicted by computer models of the United
Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The U.N. panel
is raising its rhetoric, too. London’s daily Independent reports that
the panel predicts crop yields will fall by 2 percent every decade,
leading to malnutrition and starvation. There will be floods, fires,
civil war, hay fever, heat waves, boils, various itches, pestilence and
plagues on mankind.

The net cost to the world’s economy could be as much as $1.4 trillion a year, disaster on the scale of Obamacare.

If
that’s not bad enough, researchers at the University of Maryland insist
that global warming will destroy civilization. A forthcoming journal
article asserts that expanding population and the difference in wealth
between the rich (“the elites”) and the poor (“commoners”) will bring
down the United States in the way the barbarians brought down the Roman
Empire.

There’s a solution, of course. Higher taxes, increased
regulation and more government supervision of everyone’s lives, and
other liberal nostrums.

In an earlier presentation on “Population
and Climate Change,” the Maryland researchers find hope. “In order to
avoid collapse, government policies are needed to stabilize population
and stabilize industrial production per person.”

A powerful
centralized government must take over the means of production and even
reproduction. “Family planning is cost-effective,” they write, “and
should be a primary method to reduce [carbon-dioxide] emissions.”

Sacrificing
babies to the ancient gods of Carthage didn’t save that ancient empire,
and abortion won’t chill the climate today. The public is tuning out
the likes of Al Gore and his prophecies because they notice that two
decades of hysterical predictions haven’t come true.

In a climate
of skepticism, the only way for scientists with a scam to get attention
(and government grants) is to concoct ever more over-the-top claims.

If
driving a Chevy Volt will reduce incidents of rape or a curlicue light
bulb will rescue Western civilization, a finding that Earth’s
temperature hasn’t budged in 210 months should be something to
celebrate. It means the planet is doing just fine.

The White House science adviser confuses global-warming fact and fancy

Holdren

By Chip Knappenberger

In
recent months, White House science adviser John Holdren has repeatedly
pushed the link between extreme weather events and human-caused climate
change well beyond the bounds of established science. Now, veteran
climate scientists are pushing back.

Mr. Holdren’s efforts
started in January, as much of the nation was shivering in the midst of
an excursion of arctic air into the lower 48 states.

Anyone with a
passing interest in the climate of the United States knows that is
hardly an unusual occurrence (“citrus freeze” anyone?), but outfit the
chill with a new, scarier-sounding moniker and a blase-sounding
“cold-air outbreak” goes viral as the “polar vortex.”

Apparently,
sensing the time was ripe for a bit of global-warming alarmism, the
White House released a video titled “The Polar Vortex Explained in 2
Minutes,” featuring Mr. Holdren describing how “a growing body of
evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by
much of the United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to
see with increasing frequency as global warming continues.”

Although
this statement is not outright false, it is, at its very best, a
half-truth — and a stretch at that. In fact, there is an ever-larger and
faster-growing body of evidence that directly disputes Mr. Holdren’s
contention.

This was pointed out last month in a letter to
Science magazine authored by five veteran climate scientists, who are
all experts in the field of atmospheric circulation patterns.

The
scientists disputed Mr. Holdren’s explanation, writing that “we do not
view the theoretical arguments underlying it to be compelling” and
concluded that while such research “deserves a fair hearing to make it
the centerpiece of the public discourse is inappropriate and a
distraction.”

One of the letter’s authors, atmospheric science
professor John Wallace from the University of Washington, even wrote a
guest post at the popular Capital Weather Gang blog run by The
Washington Post, to proclaim, “I disagree with those who argue that we
need to capitalize on recent extreme weather events to raise public
awareness of human-induced global warming.”

Such pushback didn’t stop Mr. Holdren, though.

A
couple of weeks ago at a congressional hearing, Mr. Holdren attacked
the views of University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke Jr.
concerning the connection between anthropogenic global warming and the
ongoing drought in the Southwest.

Mr. Pielke, an expert on the
relationship between natural disasters and climate change, had
previously testified to Congress that the best science regarding many
types of extreme weather, including hurricanes, tornados, floods and
droughts, indicated no detectable tie-in to global warming.

Mr.
Holdren described Mr. Pielke’s views as being outside of “mainstream
scientific opinion” and submitted a six-page explanation to the Senate
subcommittee describing why he thought so, focusing on drought and
specifically California drought (a copy of which was also posted at the
White House website).

In response, Mr. Pielke defended himself,
laying out a strong and overwhelming scientific case in a lengthy essay
for The New Republic and accusing Mr. Holdren of “wielding his political
position to delegitimize an academic whose views he finds
inconvenient.”

Mr. Pielke was not alone in his defense. Recently,
Martin Hoerling, lead scientist of the Interpreting Climate Conditions
Team of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
expressed surprise at Mr. Holdren’s response to Mr. Pielke in the
DotEarth blog hosted by The New York Times.

Mr. Hoerling wrote
that the type of drought currently facing California “has been observed
before” and that “[i]t is quite clear that the scientific evidence does
not support an argument that this current California drought is
appreciably, if at all, linked to human-induced climate change.”

In
his State of the Union address, President Obama called for “more
urgency” in combating climate change, and with his Climate Action Plan —
his attempt to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions by fiat — a central
theme to his legacy, we have to wonder just who is advising who?

Is
the president giving orders to his science adviser to make the case
that carbon-dioxide emissions are the cause of weather disasters in the
United States despite the best science that argues otherwise? Or is his
science adviser misinforming the president as to what the collection of
science actually says, leading him to pursue carbon-dioxide regulation
where it is not needed?

They
are the controversial contraptions that stand tall on the horizon –
providing eco-friendly, renewable energy according to some, blotting the
landscape according to others.

But a new survey has planted a
foot firmly in the former camp – suggesting that wind farms are now in
danger of destroying the beauty of some of the most striking portions of
the Scottish countryside.

The poll, carried out by the
Mountaineering Council of Scotland, has found that climbers and walkers
are being deterred from visiting the country’s rural areas because of
the increasing encroachment of turbines into what were once wide-open
spaces.

In results that will make worrying reading for the
Scottish government, the survey found that over two thirds of people –
68 per cent – say that parts of Scotland are now less appealing to
visitors thanks to the proliferation of wind farms.

A similar number – 67 per cent – say that wind farms are making Scotland a less appealing place in general.

Two
thirds of those surveyed say they have been put off visiting Scotland
by wind farms – and will not revisit places they have already visited
where turbines now exist.

Over fourth fifths of respondents are
insisting that there must be protection for National Parks and National
Scenic Areas. And two-thirds of those questioned want to see buffer
zones around areas of specific beauty, so that wind farms cannot be
placed on their edges.

‘The survey results are a stark warning to
the Scottish government,’ says David Gibson of the Mountaineering
Council of Scotland. ‘Badly sited wind farms are a serious threat to
Scotland’s reputation as a tourism destination.’ ‘The more that
are built in our mountains, the more visitors are put off.’

Scotland
has taken a marked step towards the wide use of wind power in the last
decade. The Scottish government hopes to generate 100 per cent of
Scotland’s energy from renewable sources by 2020 – with the majority of
this power coming from wind farms.

Whitelee Wind Farm, which
opened in East Renfrewshire in 2009, is the largest on-shore wind farm
in the UK, with 215 turbines (and the second largest in Europe, behind
only the Fântânele-Cogealac development in Romania).

Clyde Wind Farm, in South Lanarkshire, is another sizeable wind project, with 152 turbines.

The
rising use of wind power is of concern to Mr Gibson. ‘Many of the wind
farms planned for Scotland’s most remote and beautiful areas have yet to
be built,’ he continues. ‘The evidence from this, and other, surveys,
suggests that visitors dislike them more and more as they cease to be a
novelty.’

The survey consulted 970 regular climbers and hikers
who are members of either the Mountaineering Council of Scotland or the
British Mountaineering Council. Over three quarters of those
surveyed – 77 per cent – live in Scotland.

Wind power is a
consistently divisive topic. A YouGov poll commissioned by the
Sunday Times last October found a pretty even split on the question of
whether the UK government is right – considering future energy needs –
to invest money in the development of wind technology.

Fifty-one per cent of those questioned said that the government was right in this case.

Pretty sad when you have to start de-brainwashing your kids when they are only in kindergarten.

Via EAG News:

A
West Michigan mother is questioning a book her kindergarten son brought
home from his school’s library, because it portrays the global warming
debate from one perspective only, and ignores other arguments.

The
book – “The Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge” – tells the
story of a teacher, Ms. Frizzle, taking her students on a globetrotting
trip to show them the impacts of global warming.

Published by
Scholastic in 2010, it features drawings of the what the Artic used to
look like – with ice as far as the eye could see – to today, with polar
bears supposedly clinging to measly icebergs with desperate looks on
their faces.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

18 March, 2014

How the Global Warming Scare Began

Heartland
friend John Coleman is among the many courageous meteorologists who are
speaking out against the fake science of man-caused global warming.
He’s brave, influential, and has the backing of his TV station in San
Diego, KUSI, to produce videos such as the one at left titled “How the
Global Warming Scare Began.”

Coleman is the founder of The
Weather Channel, was the first weatherman on “Good Morning America,” and
was named “Broadcast Meteorologist of the Year” by the American
Meteorological Society. (NOTE: Coleman quit the AMS when, he says, it
was clear “the politics had gotten in the way of the science.”)

In
the video in the player to the left, Coleman says something all global
warming “skeptics” could agree upon: If the science actually backed up
the notion that humans were endangering the earth’s climate, he’d be on
the front lines to save the planet. “But it’s just not happening,” he
said.

The little warming we have now is well within (and even
below) natural variations over the centuries. But the fruitless “fight”
against man-caused global warming is wasting enormous sums of money —
seen in government outlays, and in the unduly rising energy bills of
every American.

In his video, Coleman gives us many “Cold Hard Facts.” Here are some of them:

Arctic ice levels are well within the average measured by satellites since first recorded about 35 years ago.

Polar bear populations are up, not down.

The
“global warming” superstorms the alarmists predicted have not
materialized. No hurricanes hit the US in 2013. Superstorm Sandy was
nothing compared to the Galveston Hurricane in 1900, before man
supposedly had influence on the climate. Strong tornadoes have been
diminishing, too.

We haven’t had a “killer heat wave” since the 1950s.

Al
Gore got a “D” in the only science course he took at Harvard, taught by
the godfather of climate alarmism, Roger Revelle … and the rest is
history (including Revelle apologizing for his previous alarmism and
Gore responding by calling him “senile.”)

There is so much more. The video in the player above is the primer you must show your alarmist friends.

For
more information on what’s really happening to the earth’s climate,
visit The Heartland Institute’s archive of its eight international
conferences on climate change — featuring more than 300 presentations by
187 scientists, economists, and policy experts (including Coleman).

For
the very latest observable climate science, as opposed to political
climate science, visit the Climate Change Reconsidered site. Stay tuned
to that site, and The Heartland Institute, for news about yet another
report from the Nongovernmental Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) that
will be released later this month.

China
is reconsidering plans for a carbon tax as local air pollution trumps
concerns over climate change and some rich nations back away from
imposing a tax on greenhouse gas emissions, a top official said.

Premier
Li Keqiang last week declared war on pollution, which is expected to
speed up the process of turning China's limited environmental levy into a
full-blown tax targeting the nation's major polluters.

But the
all-out efforts to combat China's disastrous pollution levels might get
in the way of plans to tax carbon dioxide emissions in a bid to stunt
the rapid growth of greenhouse gas emissions, Zhu Guangyao, the vice
environment minister, said.

"We have to reflect the requests of
the majority through many consultation rounds," he told the Beijing
Morning Post from the sidelines of China's annual parliamentary
sessions.

A carbon tax is increasingly controversial among
lawmakers, said Zhu, adding that an environment tax would be easier to
push through without carbon in the mix.

The carbon and air
pollution taxes would target mostly the same sources, and in difficult
economic times China is wary of hitting companies with too many costly
regulations.

Zhu also referred to the fact that Australia, under
the Abbott government, is trying to abolish the country's carbon tax,
while a price on carbon has been blocked in the United States.

China's
Ministry of Environment currently collects a modest levy on air
pollution, waste water and solid waste. As China's environmental
problems have caused large-scale public anger the past year, the ruling
Communist Party wants to ramp up taxation efforts.

The Ministry
of Finance and the National Development and Reform Commission have both
said a tax on carbon emissions might be implemented in addition to
China's planned emissions trading scheme, its main policy to combat
climate change, although studies are still being carried out on how it
would work.

LOVING
life? Well, lap it up because the days of driving around in comfy cars,
feasting on fancy food and enjoying an aircon-cooled civilised
existence could be numbered.

With rising population, depleting
natural resources and stretching social divide, civilisation could be
facing collapse within the next few decades according to a scientific
study funded by NASA. And if you think this is a load of scaremongering
tosh, it’s happened before. Remember the Roman Empire?

In the
report conducted by applied mathematician, Safa Motesharri, his ‘Human
And Nature Dynamical’ (Handy) model claims “the process of
rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout
history”.

“The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not
more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many
advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that
advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilisations can be both
fragile and impermanent.”

Our modern world might appear to be
pretty sure of itself with advanced technologies helping people live
longer and revolutionising everyday life but this might be to blame.
Using his theoretical model Motesharri explored several factors and ran
different scenarios that could lead to the collapse of industrial
civilisation and found a break down of society could arise from global
population growing rapidly and unsustainable resource exploitation.

And
as resources deplete, they will become more expensive. This is where he
further states that “economic stratification” — where society is
further divided based on wealth — will create “Elites” (rich) and
“Masses” (poor) with the Elites being responsible for over consuming
leaving the Masses in famine and collapsing social structure.

But
before you start hoarding resources, the study does conclude that this
scenario is not inevitable and that in order to prevent such catastrophe
it calls on action by the Elites to share the wealth and to do their
bit in restoring balance.

“Collapse can be avoided and population
can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is
reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a
reasonably equitable fashion”

It does serve as a wake up call
that if we don’t want to face disaster we need to seriously consider how
we manage resources, population growth and wealth. The end is not yet
nigh...if we can help it.

Driven demented by fear, a mother thinks of setting herself alight to draw attention to the (missing) global warming crisis

Here
is a woman who looks young enough to have been exposed to climate alarm
propaganda throughout her school and college years. Children get
frightened by that, and some may never grow out of it as they get
older. She may well be one of them:

In an article (hat-tip Climate Depot) on an Oregon news-site, she explains:

'A
Tunisian man set himself on fire in 2010 and sparked an international
movement. Don’t tell my family, but I’ve considered that route. I mean,
wouldn’t any parent sacrifice a kidney, lung or life for her child?
Imagine the headline: “Soccer mom desperate to save children’s future
self-immolates.”'

On her own blog (linked to below the pic), she displays this banner:

This
may represent a delayed success of sorts for the climate alarm
campaigners. Some of them, including for example UNESCO and also
Pachauri of the IPCC, want children to be little political
activists. First they scare'em then they snare'em. Well,
this woman got so scared she thought of killing herself for the sake of
her children. I'd say she was snared as well. Let us hope
for her sake, and her children's, that she calms down a lot more and
starts to develop a calmer perspective on climate variation and its
various causes.

PS Another example, from 2013. Here is a
father from the other side of the States: 'When Ian Kim imagines the
world his 7-year-old daughter will be living in 20 years from now, he
says, it keeps him up at night. Images of ever more frequent super
storms like Sandy, along with rising seas, or drought and heat waves
wreaking havoc with crops haunt his waking hours. “It’s a huge
worry for me,” said Kim, a self-described environmental and social
justice activist. “On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s a 10.” ' Once you
are such an activist, you do need a good crisis to keep you going, even
it is largely in his own mind.

Paul
Ehrlich and Ann Ehrlich, two long-time prominent voices in the
environmental community, often speculate about the future of humanity.
They recently shared this anecdote:

"A few
years ago we had a disagreement with our friend Jim Brown, a leading
ecologist. We told him we thought there was about a 10 percent
chance of avoiding a collapse of civilization but, because of concern
for our grandchildren and great grandchildren, we were willing to
struggle to make it 11 percent. He said his estimate of the chance
of avoiding collapse was only 1 percent, but he was working to make it
1.1 percent. Sadly, recent trends and events make us think Jim
might have been optimistic. Perhaps now it’s time to talk about
preparing for some form of collapse soon, hopefully to make a relatively
soft “landing.”"

If you want to know why the Ehrlichs think it’s
essentially game over for civilization, read their 2013 paper published
in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Their diagnosis:

"The human predicament is driven by overpopulation, overconsumption of
natural resources and the use of unnecessarily environmentally damaging
technologies and socio-economic-political arrangements to service Homo
sapiens’ aggregate consumption."

Translation: Too many damn
people on the earth, driving cars, buying too much crap, all made
possible by a globalized, industrialized, capitalistic system. Or
something like that. Unsurprisingly, the Ehrlichs don’t agree with those
who paint a sunnier view of humanity’s current trajectory. (What might a
model sustainable society look like? Paul Ehrlich recently pointed to
Australia’s Aboriginal culture.)

Now I’m not the only one to observe that the environmental community, as a whole, has a bleak view of the future.

But
is the near-future collapse of civilization virtually guaranteed, as
the Ehrlichs seem to think? Is there no reversing this collision course?
Here’s what UK environmentalist Jonathan Porritt said last week in an
interview:

"A lot of people in my community of
sustainability professionals have basically come to the conclusion it’s
too late."

This strikes me as a self-defeating outlook, as I
hinted the other day. It lends itself to the fatalism that has already
infected environmental discourse, as I have previously discussed:

"If you are a regular consumer of environmental news and commentary,
you are familiar with the narrative of humanity’s downfall."

In
the current issue of The New York Review Of Books, the novelist Zadie
Smith is conflicted about this eco-doomsday narrative. On the one hand,
she is bothered that most people aren’t taking seriously “the visions of
apocalypse conjured by climate scientists and movie directors,” which
she refers to as “the coming emergency.” But she also seems to get the
futility of this storyline:

"Sometimes the
global, repetitive nature of this elegy is so exhaustively sad—and so
divorced from any attempts at meaningful action—that you can’t fail to
detect in the elegists a fatalist liberal consciousness that has, when
you get right down to it, as much of a perverse desire for the
apocalypse as the evangelicals we supposedly scorn."

Indeed, the
merchants of eco-doom who peddle their vision of apocalypse to a secular
choir are just as self-rightous and scornful of humanity as the
fundamentalist preachers who hawk their hellfire and brimstone sermons.
And like the most warped fundamentalists who exploit tragedy, the
merchants of eco-doom also cynically seize on current events. On this
score, nobody rivals Nafeez Ahmed (the UK Left’s faux-scholarly
equivalent to Glenn Beck), who has an unquenchable appetite for
peak-everything porn. (For commentary on his latest connect-the-collapse
dots, see this post.)

Not all greens have a fetish for doomsday
scenarios. Some are are trying to chart a more empowering vision for
environmentalism. Porritt belongs to this group. He has a new book that
appears hopeful about the future.

If only more environmentalists
could snap out of their endless mourning for the planet and offer the
rest of us something to look forward to other than imminent
eco-collapse.

The
standoff between Russia and Ukraine that precipitated [yesterday’s]
farcical referendum on Crimean secession evokes memories of past
attempts to use energy as a geopolitical weapon.

Upon closer
inspection, it also reveals the early stages of a historically
significant shift in global energy politics that would have seemed
improbable a generation ago.

During the similarly brutal winters
of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the United States was heavily
dependent on foreign supplies of energy. As the U.S. stared down the
barrel of the oil weapon amid the 1979-'80 Iranian hostage crisis,
energy expenditures as a percentage of U.S. gross domestic product
reached 14%, triggering double-digit inflation and a double-dip
recession.

Since then, energy's share of the domestic economy has
fallen by about half as a combination of conservation measures,
improved efficiency and increased production has begun to turn the
tables on foreign suppliers like Russia and the OPEC cartel.

In 2013, U.S. oil production reached its highest level in 24 years.

Yet
crude oil is so...20th century. In 1973, 46% of global energy supplies
were derived from petroleum-based products. By 2011, that number had
fallen to 36.1%.

These days, the story is natural gas, whose
world market share over that same period rose from 18.9% to 25.7%, a
number that is expected to increase sharply in coming years as more gas
is extracted from shale rock formations through fracking, especially in
the United States.

According to Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning author of "The Prize" and an expert on all things energy,
shale gas now accounts for more than a third of U.S. natural gas
production, up from 2% in 2000, and could reach 50% or more within six
years.

Unlike oil, natural gas is difficult to ship across
oceans. Pipelines, like the ones Russia has used to sell its gas to
Europe, can transmit energy through vast landmasses. That method,
however, is vulnerable to one or more parties turning off the spigot for
political reasons.

Russia's state-owned energy behemoth,
Gazprom, did exactly that twice in the last 10 years, and recently
rescinded the price discount it gave the Ukraine as a "reward" for
allowing Russian gas to reach its major export markets in Western
Europe.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the United States now produces
more oil than it imports, the latter having fallen 30% since 2005. In
fact, the U.S. is projected to surpass Saudi Arabia as the world's
largest oil producer within a few years and already has passed Russia as
the top gas producer.

The global economic impact of shale gas
could be magnified when the first facilities to ship it from the U.S. in
liquid form, known as liquefied natural gas, or LNG, become operational
late next year. That will begin to put American policy-makers in the
once-unfathomable position of having an energy weapon with which to
apply geopolitical leverage.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

17 March, 2014

EPA Bureaucrats Paint the Town Red with Federal Charge Cards

There
appears to be a flourishing culture of financial misconduct at the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This culture has been perpetuated
by a lack of administrative oversight leading to millions of taxpayer
dollars being wasted. At a time when D.C.’s fiscal climate is
characterized by a national debt that is spiraling out of control, there
is no excuse for any government organization to be lacking financial
accountability.

A report released this month by the EPA Inspector
General (IG) found EPA employees improperly used federal charge cards
to purchase everything from gym memberships to gift cards. The report
indicated over 90 percent of the sampled transactions were for
prohibited, improper, or erroneous purchases, all paid for by American
taxpayers. Ironically, Senate Democrats this week carried on an
all-night filibuster in hopes of generating even more power and funding
for the EPA.

In compiling the report, the IG’s office obtained a
spreadsheet of 67,000 EPA transactions from Fiscal Year (FY) 2012, and
randomly selected 69 transactions. They also selected 11 transactions
that seemed inappropriate because of the merchant involved. For
instance, some transactions were with merchants listed as dance halls,
child care organizations, music venues and theatres. Of the 80
transactions sampled, 75 were for prohibited, improper, or erroneous
purchases.

The IG’s report outlined nine specific internal
control oversight issues, ranging from the approval of prohibited
transactions to the outright failure to maintain transaction records.
Some specific instances of misconduct were so egregious they are worth
mentioning. In three instances, cardholders purchased gym memberships
totaling $2,867. Two of those purchases were not even for EPA employees
but for family members. According to the report, cardholders further
violated EPA guidelines regarding inappropriate food purchases:

“Although light refreshments are defined as those that do not include
portions of food typical of a meal, in one of our samples, light
refreshments included all elements of a meal for an awards ceremony.
Four different appetizers, chicken tenderloin, fresh fruit, pasta salad,
large cookies, soft drinks and punch were purchased at a cost of
$2,900. Meals are not an allowable expense for an awards recognition
ceremony.”

The report also found the purchase of gift cards by
EPA cardholders was a problem in seven transactions. For example, in one
transaction 20 American Express gift cards were purchased totaling
$1,588. Additionally, the report highlighted instances where EPA
employees violated records keeping requirements:

“Two transactions totaling $26,152 could not be located despite
instructions to maintain supporting documentation. The EPA’s policy
requires the retention of documentation for 3 years on a fiscal year
basis. Cardholders were not attentive to this basic requirement. In two
cases, the cardholders left their positions and no arrangements were
made to retain the records. In another transaction the cardholder stated
that records were not kept because of privacy concerns. This lack of
documentation increases the risk that purchases could be fraudulent,
improper or abusive.”

It must be noted the report focused on
only 80 transactions out of 67,000. Over 90 percent of those
transactions were prohibited or improper. For FY 2012, the EPA had 1,370
cardholders that transacted more than $29 million in purchases. The EPA
also had 309 convenience check writers who wrote more than 1,000 checks
totaling over $500,000. It’s likely the 80 transactions sampled are the
tip of an iceberg characterized by improper and wasteful spending of
federal funds.

The ultimate irony is a similar report conducted
in 2008 found the exact same internal control weaknesses as those from
the most recent report. The IG’s report isn’t the only example of EPA
administrative failures, lest we forget the saga of John Beale that
played out from the early 90’s to 2012.

Beale was a former EPA
employee whose fraud cost taxpayers almost a million dollars. Beale was
one of the highest paid EPA employees, due in part to his receipt of a
fraudulent retention bonus. A 2014 report by the Institute for Energy
Research (IER) titled “Dirty Business at the EPA” also found that from
2000-2012 Beale was absent from work over 600 days, often citing the
outlandish excuse he was conducting CIA missions.

The kicker is
that at the height of Beale’s fraud from 2009-2012, his direct
supervisor was then OAR Assistant Administrator Gina McCarthy. IER’s
report found in just three years under McCarthy, Beale committed fraud
totaling $373,799, almost as high as the amount of his three previous
supervisors combined.

One would predict that after Beale’s decade
long fraud heads would have rolled at the EPA. Instead, Gina McCarthy
is now the Administrator of the EPA. To quote directly from the IER’s
report, “if McCarthy’s oversight of employees is so lax that someone can
get paid without showing up for work for over a year then how can the
American people trust the other pronouncements from McCarthy’s EPA?”

The
IG’s recent report evidences an ongoing culture of financial misconduct
at the EPA. It’s doubtful this culture will change given the current
EPA Administrator failed to notice the greatest fraud in EPA history was
being committed on her watch. Thus in years to come, Americans could
again find themselves footing the bill for EPA employees’ gym
memberships and fictitious CIA missions.

The EPA is charging $75,000/day over a private citizen’s pond, but don’t you worry about their revisions to the Clean Water Act

Earlier
this week, I mentioned an NYT article detailing the concerns of a large
group of farmers, ranchers, manufacturers, builders, and etcetera over
the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent undertaking to personally
revise the parameters of the Clean Water Act. The Act was originally
meant to give the EPA the authority to regulate waters connecting to the
“navigable waterways” of the United States, but as the EPA has steadily
and aggressively tried to expand their jurisdiction over the years,
they have had to deal with far too many bothersome lawsuits challenging
their authority. Ergo, they decided to rewrite the rules to more clearly
define exactly what bodies of water are within their regulatory power —
and a bunch of lawmakers, lobbies, businesses, and private citizens are
worried that the end result is going to be yet another massive EPA
power grab that will make big government an even more pervasive and
retarding for in commercial activity and on private property.

The
EPA, of course, is scornfully dismissing these concerns and would
really like for everyone to just calm down. After all, these bureaucrats
are just trying to do their munificent “green” jobs, and as one lawyer
in the aforementioned NYT article impatiently noted of the draft
regulations leaked late last year, “The draft guidance is clear that
irrigation ditches, drainage ponds and even groundwater are not
considered waters of the U.S. Nor are gullies, rills, swales and other
erosional features. This has been explained over and over again.”

Yes, I simply can’t imagine why any of these concerned groups think they have a reason to worry. Via Fox News:

"All Andy Johnson wanted to do was build a stock pond on his sprawling
eight-acre Wyoming farm. He and his wife Katie spent hours constructing
it, filling it with crystal-clear water, and bringing in brook and brown
trout, ducks and geese. It was a place where his horses could drink and
graze, and a private playground for his three children.

But instead of enjoying the fruits of his labor, the Wyoming welder
says he was harangued by the federal government, stuck in what he calls a
petty power play by the Environmental Protection Agency. He claims the
agency is now threatening him with civil and criminal penalties –
including the threat of a $75,000-a-day fine.

The government says he violated the Clean Water Act by building a dam
on a creek without a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. Further,
the EPA claims that material from his pond is being discharged into
other waterways. Johnson says he built a stock pond — a man-made pond
meant to attract wildlife — which is exempt from Clean Water Act
regulations.

The property owner says he
followed the state rules for a stock pond when he built it in 2012 and
has an April 4-dated letter from the Wyoming State Engineer’s Office to
prove it. …

But the EPA isn’t backing down and
argues they have final say over the issue. They also say Johnson needs
to restore the land or face the fines."

But those Clean Water Act
revisions they say they have no intention of abusing? You should
definitely just take their word for it.

An
assistant philosophy professor at Rochester Institute of Technology has
proposed a bold plan to settle the debate on Global Warming. Lawrence
Torcello wrote an essay suggesting that scientists who fail to fall in
line with global warming alarmists should be charged with criminal
negligence, and possibly even be thrown in jail. Nothing screams
academic freedom like a little intellectual Fascism. Right?

When
it comes to global warming, much of the public remains in denial about a
set of facts that the majority of scientists clearly agree on.

Well,
Larry (can we call him Larry?), it might surprise you – an assistant
professor of philosophy – to learn that science is not a democratic
study. Skepticism, opposition, and deviation from the adopted narrative
are more responsible for scientific discovery than blind allegiance to
any prevailing theory. And, quite frankly, the theory of anthropogenic
global warming has been delegitimized by some of its greatest
proponents… Most scientists would agree that it becomes increasingly
difficult to believe in a theory that has routinely failed to produce
any moderately accurate models or predictions. But, of course it gets
better:

With such high stakes, an organized campaign funding misinformation ought to be considered criminally negligent.

Laughably,
Larry is not talking about East Anglia, Al Gore, or the UN Climate
Change Scandal (where a number of scientists were quoted out of context
to give the impression of a consensus view on climate change). In fact,
while Larry alleges that “deniers” (apparently the word “skeptic”
doesn’t have the right amount of stigma attached to it) are engaged in a
misinformation campaign, he never once defends the propagandistic
efforts of the global-warming-faithful.

Governments, activist
groups, well connected CEOs, and elite billionaire Liberals have pushed
trillions of dollars into the propagation of global warming fears. And
yet, strangely, this assistant philosophy professor seems incapable
unwilling to see the irony of his allegations. But, wait… He soon goes
for the jugular:

We have good reason to consider the funding of
climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent. The charge of
criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the
climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to
undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.

Ah…
So scientists who dare to question the provably wrong predictions of
melted ice caps, winterless years, and raising sea levels should be
charged with negligence for “undermining the public’s understanding of
scientific consensus”? Well, here’s some scientific consensus for you,
Larry:

The world has not seen a measurable increase in
temperatures for over 15 years. Arctic ice has increased in mass since
2013. The “Polar Vortex” is part of a broader, and predictable, weather
shift that has been happening for thousands of years. “Climate Change”
has been occurring, without man-made forces, for every single one of the
billions of years this rock has been spinning around the sun.

But,
let’s be honest: Larry isn’t really worried about the science (even
though I’m sure his studies in philosophy have yielded him great
insights into climatology, atmospheric science, and meteorological
changes throughout history). He’s worried about opposition to his
beliefs. He even acknowledges some of the pushback that his idea might
receive:

Misguided?
The Left’s intolerance, it seems, has no bounds. A student from Harvard
recently argued against academic freedom. Not wanting to be outdone,
this assistant professor is now suggesting that political opponents (or
for that matter, scientists who don’t tow his ideological ideals) be
criminally charged. It is almost stunning how easily the Left will adopt
the notion of censorship and intellectual fascism to limit their
opposition.

For being an assistant professor of philosophy,
Torcello seems stunningly married to an egocentric world view. People
who disagree with him, in his mind, are not merely “wrong”… They’re
crossing the threshold into criminality. This is a point of view that is
growing among the Left. Opponents to the President are racist.
Opponents of Nancy Pelosi are sexist. Advocates for traditional marriage
are bigots. And, apparently, opponents to the theory of anthropogenic
global warming are worthy of a little jail time. This doesn’t seem like
positions that lend themselves to any degree of philosophical integrity.

If
Larry really wants to help fight global warming, he should keep his
totalitarian mouth shut… Currently, he’s spewing too much hot air into
the atmosphere.

We
learned something really surprising about the wind energy industry from
President Obama's FY2015 budget proposal. He doesn't believe that the
industry will ever be capable of economically sustaining itself.

Here's
how we know. Tucked away within the proposal, President Obama is
proposing making the wind energy production tax credit permanent.

"Mr. Obama’s budget would permanently extend the production tax credit
for wind electricity, which expired last year after Congress failed to
pass a bill renewing it. Over the next 10 years, the tax credit would
cost $19.2 billion, according to the budget plan.

Senate Finance Chairman Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) has indicated he wants to
pass a bill extending this tax credit and other temporary ones. But it’s
unclear whether he has enough support to pass it in the full Senate,
and the House seems even less likely to support such a proposal."

Originally
established in 1992, the wind energy production tax credit has had a
lot to do with fueling the growth of the nation's wind energy generating
capacity since its inception. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory
reports just how much the installed capacity for wind has grown in the
years from 2000 through 2012, much of which has been enabled by the wind
energy production tax credit subsidy:

So with that kind of
"success", why does the wind energy industry need a permanent tax
credit? After all, the purpose of the tax credit was to greatly
accelerate the growth of the nation's installed capacity for wind energy
- not to permanently sustain it.

That's why the U.S. Congress is willing to do away with the wind energy industry's tax credit:

"This sweetheart deal looks to be on its way out, in part because it
succeeded in what it set out to do. Over the past five years, wind has
accounted for 36 percent of all new electricity generation installed in
the U.S., second only to new natural gas installations. Wind now
supplies more than 4 percent of the country’s electricity. At about
60,000 megawatts, there’s enough wind energy capacity to power 15.2
million U.S. homes, a more than twentyfold increase since 2000. It’s
still tiny compared to fossil fuel: Combined, coal and natural gas
supply roughly two-thirds of U.S. electricity. But wind produces about
six times more electricity than solar. That’s led Congress to take steps
to do away with tax incentives first established in 1992 to help the
fledgling industry take root. In December lawmakers allowed the credit
to expire."

The problem though is that for all its apparent
success, wind energy is far from being as reliable as the fans of
renewable energy would make it seem:

"In
Texas, the wind tends to blow the hardest in the middle of the night.
That’s also when most people are asleep and electricity prices drop,
which would be a big problem for the companies that own the state’s
7,690 wind turbines if not for a 20-year-old federal subsidy that
effectively pays them a flat rate for making clean energy no matter what
time it is. Wind farms, whether privately owned or part of a public
utility, receive a $23 tax credit for every megawatt-hour of electricity
they generate. (A megawatt-hour is enough juice to power about 1,000
homes for one hour.) This credit, which was worth about $2 billion for
all U.S. wind projects in 2013, has helped lower the price of
electricity in parts of the country where wind power is prevalent, since
wind producers can charge less and still turn a profit. In Texas, the
biggest wind-producing state in the U.S., wind farms have occasionally
sold electricity for less than zero—that is, they’ve paid to provide
power to the grid to undercut the state’s nuclear or coal energy
providers."

To find out how reliable wind energy is for utility
consumers, we've taken the NREL's data and calculated the average
production for the nation's installed wind capacity

For our
calculation of Average Wind Energy Produced, we divided the total
electricity generated by wind by 8,760, which is the number of hours in a
year. The result gives us a good indication of how much of the claimed
"Installed Capacity" for wind energy was actually realized, for which
we've also calculated the percentage.

That math assumes that the
wind power generating equipment that has been installed would be running
24 hours a day, which is far from the case, as the strength of the wind
varies throughout the course of a day, and also for more mundane
reasons, such as the need to perform periodic maintenance, during which
the wind turbines are shut down from operating. As such, it does not
give an indication of the efficiency at which electricity is generated
while the wind turbines are running.

What it does do however is
give us a good sense of how reliable wind energy is in generating
electricity for utility consumers. From 2000 through 2012, what we find
is that wind energy delivered anywhere from 18% to 29% of its installed
capacity, demonstrating a considerable degree of unreliability for
utility consumers compared to other methods of generating power. Going
by the wind energy industry's own claims, instead of powering the
equivalent of 15 million American homes, it's actually only powering
enough power for somewhere between 2.7 and 4.35 million of them.

Put
another way, for utility consumers, wind energy is only capable of
delivering somewhere between one-fifth to less than one-third of its
promise. And even then, it doesn't deliver what it produces when it's
really needed.

That's why the wind energy industry badly needs its production tax credit to be made permanent:

"That the green energy lobby is now working to make the wind energy tax
credit a permanent burden upon U.S. taxpayers, even as the industry
supporters claim the industry's "success", really means that the entire
industry's business model is fatally flawed. In calling to make the tax
credit permanent at their behest, President Obama is really
communicating on their behalf that the wind energy industry will never
be able to sustain itself without it.

A smart
investor would recognize these things and cut their losses so they could
move on to greener opportunities. Allowing the wind energy industry's
tax credit to permanently expire rather than be made a permanent burden
for American taxpayers would make that possible."

Alas, President Obama is not a smart investor. Especially where green energy is involved.

Top
on the list of potential venues for the next shale boom are China,
Russia and Argentina, but the world’s next shale revolution likely will
be in Australia, which appears to be the most attractive place for
companies to pursue tight oil and gas, according to a Lux Research
analysis released recently.

While companies have eyed shale
development in China, lured by the prospect of huge reserves and easy
financing, Australia is said to have the know-how, experience and
infrastructure to be a more attractive place to drill into shale plays.

It
also beats out Argentina, which has expansive shale reserves, but has
experienced political instability despite attractive government
incentives, according to the Lux report, written by research associate
Daniel Choi.

Australia also emerged as the third top investment
destinations in 2014 after US and Brazil, according to a recent research
report published by DNV GL, the leading technical advisor to the oil
and gas industry.

“Australia does not have the seemingly
bottomless development capital of China, or the powerful government
incentives of Argentina,” the Lux report said. “However, Australia more
than makes up for this by having the characteristics conducive to
successful commercial production, which other front-runners like
Argentina, China, U.K., and Poland lack.”

“This includes existing
infrastructure, low population density in key shale plays, and citizens
who welcome resource extraction through its long mining legacy,” the
report said.

Massive projects being constructed in Australia to
produce and export natural gas to Asia make the country more attractive
for shale exploration.

Chevron is leading the development of two
massive LNG projects in Australia, at a cost of around $81 billion. The
projects will liquefy and ship natural gas to energy hungry Asian
nations.

Certainly, investors are eyeing the massive projects
going up in Australia to produce and export natural gas to Asia, where
it will fetch high prices.

Shale boom in the United States

The
massive glut in shale oil and gas resources has brought about drastic
changes in the country, with calls now being made for restrictions on
crude oil and liquefied natural gas to be lifted.

A
nasty one for the Greenies, whose work of destroying Tasmanian
forest industries will now be halted. Most of Tasmania's
vast forests have been locked up by deals with the Greenies, leading to
high levels of unemployment. Some of those deals will now be
unwound

Winning Liberal [party] leader Will Hodgman claimed
an emphatic mandate for change in the Tasmanian election after his party
was swept to majority government.

Mr Hodgman appeared to have
taken up to 14 seats in the 25 seat House of Assembly as Labor and Green
votes fell away, according to election analysts.

"We will be
decisive and we will not, we will not, adopt a business as usual
approach," Mr Hodgman told cheering supporters in the Hobart tally room
on Saturday night.

"I say tonight to Will Hodgman,
don't take us back to war," Mr McKim said. "Protect those forests and
protect our people from another four years of bitter conflict."

But Mr Hodgman went to the election promising to tear up a peace deal drawn up by industry and environmental groups.

"We
intend to deliver on all those things we have committed to Tasmanians,"
he said. "That includes in our forest industry, and supporting those
regional towns who have voted resoundingly for a change for a better
state."

Ms Giddings was returned to parliament, but her potential
successor David O'Byrne looked to have been squeezed out by the size of
the swing to the Liberals, potentially leaving the ALP with as few as
six seats.

In the cut-up of preferences, the Greens were clinging
to four seats, with the final make-up of the House of Assembly was
unlikely to be known for weeks.

"After 16 years Tasmanians have
voted for change and I congratulate Will Hodgman," Ms Giddings said.
"I'm proud to be part of this Labor government and all we've done."

She
admitted that it had been difficult to sell the message of Labor
achievements after so long in power, but her campaign was dogged by
dissent inside the party.

Backbencher Brenton Best, repeatedly
voiced his disapproval of the party leader, and said Labor should have
broken an alliance with the Greens.

As he trailed in his own
seat, Mr Best repeated his demands. "I had suggested she should have
stood aside and if she had we might have had a different result
tonight," he said.

Despite a prominent campaign by billionaire
party leader Clive Palmer, the Palmer United Party's vote fell away from
the 2013 federal result that brought in senator-elect Jacquie Lambie in
Tasmania.

"I think they would have done better to pack up and go
home a fortnight ago," said Greens MP Tim Morris. "They would
have had a better result."

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

16 March, 2014

No warmer now than it was in 2003

And other differences are microscopic when expressed as percentages of degrees Kelvin

No warming. That is what can be deduced from data compiled by NASA as it relates to temperature over the past decade.

The
average temperature in 2003 was 14.61 degrees Celsius. And the average
temperature in 2013 was 14.61 degrees Celsius, at a growth rate of 0
percent.

Yet, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by more
than 5.5 percent, from 375.77 parts per million (ppm) to 396.48 ppm,
according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA). Curious.

In fact, since 1959 — as far back as
NOAA’s dataset goes for carbon dioxide levels — carbon dioxide has
increased a whopping 25.48 percent, from 315.97 ppm to today’s level of
396.48 ppm.

Casting further doubt on the UN Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change’s man-made global warming hypothesis, carbon
emissions have been accelerating, too. For example in the 1960s, they
grew at an average rate of 0.27 percent a year, 0.39 percent in the
1970s, 0.45 percent in the 1980s, 0.42 percent in 1990s, and 0.54
percent in the 2000s.

Shouldn’t temperatures be accelerating, too?

They
only grew at an average rate of 0.18 percent in the 2000s. That
compares with 0.01 percent average annual increase in the 1990s, 0.12
percent in the 1980s, and 0.14 percent in the 1970s. In the 1960s,
temperatures actually dropped an average annual 0.39 percent rate, even
as emissions increased.

Does this suggest that the more carbon increases, the less impact it has on temperature?

A
better question then might be to what degree the rate of increase in
carbon emissions actually affects temperatures? The below chart shows
CO2 increasing at a rate far faster than temperatures.

In
the meantime, policy makers at the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) say we have to take their word for it and attempt to curb carbon
emissions here in the U.S. — if that’s even possible — while those
emissions promise to continue growing unabated overseas at an
ever-faster pace.

According to BP, carbon emissions will increase by 29 percent by 2035 based on continued growth in emerging markets.

That
implies carbon dioxide will be at a whopping 114.98 ppm above today’s
levels, or an average annual increase of 1.3 percent. That is faster
than carbon dioxide has ever grown.

And so, if carbon emissions
will be accelerating over the next couple of decades, then temperatures
should, too, eventually. Right?

The good news is we’ll find out
very soon if the rapidly increasing carbon emissions result in the
increasing temperatures the UN has predicted. So far, they have not,
calling into question why the EPA is issuing any carbon emission
restrictions. This isn’t settled at all.

Not
reproduced above is some nonsense about Celsius not being a ratio
scale. The author has evidently been bluffed by Greenies.
Celsius can be converted to a ratio scale (degrees Kelvin) simply by
adding a constant and if you compared temperatures using the Kelvin
scale, you would get an even SMALLER percentage change in temperature in
recent times

The bonfire of insanity:
Woodland is shipped 3,800 miles and burned in Drax power station. It
belches out more CO2 than coal at a huge cost YOU pay for... and all
supposedly for a cleaner, greener Britain!

On a perfect
spring day in the coastal forest of North Carolina I hike along a nature
trail – a thread of dry gravel between the pools of the Roanoke river
backwaters. A glistening otter dives for lunch just a few feet away.

Majestic
trees soar straight and tall, their roots sunk deep in the swampland:
maples, sweetgums and several kinds of oak. A pileated woodpecker – the
world’s largest species, with a wingspan of almost 2ft – whistles as it
flutters across the canopy. There the leaves are starting to bud, 100ft
above the ground.

The trees seem to stretch to the horizon: a serene and timeless landscape.

But
North Carolina’s ‘bottomland’ forest is being cut down in swathes, and
much of it pulped and turned into wood pellets – so Britain can keep its
lights on.

The UK is committed by law to a radical shift to
renewable energy. By 2020, the proportion of Britain’s electricity
generated from ‘renewable’ sources is supposed to almost triple to 30
per cent, with more than a third of that from what is called ‘biomass’.

The
only large-scale way to do this is by burning wood, man’s oldest fuel –
because EU rules have determined it is ‘carbon-neutral’.

So our
biggest power station, the leviathan Drax plant near Selby in North
Yorkshire, is switching from dirty, non-renewable coal. Biomass is far
more expensive, but the consumer helps the process by paying subsidies
via levies on energy bills.

That’s where North Carolina’s forests
come in. They are being reduced to pellets in a gargantuan pulping
process at local factories, then shipped across the Atlantic from a
purpose-built dock at Chesapeake Port, just across the state line in
Virginia.

Those pellets are burnt by the billion at Drax. Each
year, says Drax’s head of environment, Nigel Burdett, Drax buys more
than a million metric tons of pellets from US firm Enviva, around two
thirds of its total output. Most of them come not from fast-growing
pine, but mixed, deciduous hardwood.

Drax and Enviva insist this
practice is ‘sustainable’. But though it is entirely driven by the
desire to curb greenhouse gas emissions, a broad alliance of US and
international environmentalists argue it is increasing, not reducing
them.

In fact, Burdett admits, Drax’s wood-fuelled furnaces
actually produce three per cent more carbon dioxide (CO2) than coal –
and well over twice as much as gas: 870g per megawatt hour (MW/hr) is
belched out by wood, compared to just 400g for gas.

Then there’s
the extra CO2 produced by manufacturing the pellets and transporting
them 3,800 miles. According to Burdett, when all that is taken into
account, using biomass for generating power produces 20 per cent more
greenhouse gas emissions than coal.

And meanwhile, say the environmentalists, the forest’s precious wildlife habitat is being placed in jeopardy.

Drax
concedes that ‘when biomass is burned, carbon dioxide is released into
the atmosphere’. Its defence is that trees – unlike coal or gas – are
renewable because they can grow again, and that when they do, they will
neutralise the carbon in the atmosphere by ‘breathing’ it in – or in
technical parlance, ‘sequestering’ it.

These
claims are questionable. For one thing, some trees in the
‘bottomland’ woods can take more than 100 years to regrow. But for Drax,
this argument has proven beneficial and lucrative.

Only a few
years ago, as a coal-only plant, Drax was Europe’s largest greenhouse
gas emitter, and was often targeted by green activists. Now it boasts of
its ‘environmental leadership position’, saying it is the biggest
renewable energy plant in the world.

It also gets guaranteed
profits from the Government’s green energy subsidies. Last year,
these amounted to £62.5?million, paid by levies on consumers’ bills.
This is set to triple by 2016 as Drax increases its biomass capacity.

In
the longer term, the Government has decreed that customers will pay
£105 per MW/hr for Drax’s biomass electricity – £10 more than for
onshore wind energy, and £15 more than for power from the controversial
new nuclear plant to be built at Hinkley Point in Somerset.

The current ‘normal’ market electricity price is just £50 per MW/hr.

Mr
Burdett admitted: ‘Our whole business case is built on subsidy, like
the rest of the renewable energy industry. We are simply responding to
Government policy.’

Company spokesman Matt Willey added: ‘We’re a
power company. We’ve been told to take coal out of the equation. What
would you have us do – build a dirty great windfarm?’ Meanwhile,
there are other costs, less easily quantifiable.

‘These are some
of our most valuable forests,’ said my trail companion, Derb Carter,
director of the Southern Environmental Law Centre in Chapel Hill, North
Carolina.

‘Your government’s Department for Energy and
Climate Change claims what’s happening is sustainable, and carbon
neutral. But it’s not. What you’re actually doing is wrecking the
environment in the name of saving the planet.

After our
hike through the forest, Mr Carter and I drove to a nearby airfield,
where we boarded a plane. From 2,000ft up, the forest spread
beneath us. Soon, however, we reached an oblong wedge, an open wound in
the landscape.

It was a recent ‘clear cut’ where every tree had
been removed, leaving only mud, water and a few stumps. Clear cuts are
the standard means of harvesting these forests, and this one covered
about 35 acres.

In the next 10 minutes, we flew over at least a
dozen such holes in the tree cover. Finally a looming smokestack
appeared up ahead: Enviva’s pellet plant at Ahoskie.

To one side
lay the material that provides the plant’s input: a huge, circular pile
of logs: tens of thousands of them, each perhaps 30 or 40ft long.
In the middle was a heavy-duty crane. It swivelled round and grabbed
bunches of the logs as if they were matchsticks, to feed them into the
plant’s machines.

Later, we inspected the plant on the ground.
It’s clear that many of the logs are not branches, but trunks: as Carter
observed, they displayed the distinctive flaring which swampland trees
often have at their base.

Here the story becomes murky. At Drax,
Burdett said that in making pellets, Enviva used only ‘thinnings,
branches, bentwood .??.??. we are left with the rubbish, the residue
from existing forestry operations. It’s a waste or by-products
industry.’ He insisted: ‘We don’t actually chop whole trees down.’

But
looking at the plant at Ahoskie, Carter said: ‘I just don’t get this
claim that Drax doesn’t use whole trees. Most of what you’re seeing here
is whole trees.’

Pressed by The Mail on Sunday, Enviva yesterday
admitted it does use whole trees in its pellet process. But according
to spokeswoman Elizabeth Woodworth, it only pulps those deemed
‘unsuitable for sawmilling because of small size, disease or other
defects’.

She claimed such trees, no more than 26 inches in
diameter, make up a quarter of the wood processed at Ahoskie. Another 35
per cent comes from limbs and the top parts of trunks whose lower
sections went to saw mills. To put it another way: 60 per cent of the
wood cut by the loggers who supply Enviva is turned into pellets.

The
firm, she added, was ‘committed to sustainable forestry… replacing coal
with sustainably produced wood pellets reduces lifecycle emissions of
carbon dioxide by 74 to 90 per cent.’

How fast do these forests, once cut, really regrow?

Clear-cut
wetlands cannot be replanted. They will start to sprout again naturally
quite quickly, but according to Clayton Altizer of the North Carolina
forest service: ‘For bottomland sites, these types of forests are
typically on a 60 to 100-year cycle of growth depending on the soil
fertility.’ Other experts say it could easily take more than 100 years.

That
means it will be a long time before all the carbon emitted from Drax
can be re-absorbed. For decades, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere
will be higher than it would have been if Drax still burnt only coal.

Drax’s
Nigel Burdett yesterday admitted he did not know how long a North
Carolina clear-cut bottomland swathe would take to regrow, but insisted
this simply doesn’t matter. What counted, he said, was not the areas
which had been cut, but the whole region from which the pellets were
sourced.

Drax’s website implies unmistakeably that biomass
deserves its ‘carbon neutral’ status because the wood cut for pellets
regrows. But Mr Burdett said: ‘The rate at which it re-grows is
irrelevant. The crucial issue is how much there is across the whole
catchment area.’

He said that in North Carolina, as in other
southern states, more wood is growing than being cut so the
‘sustainable’ claim is justified.

There is an obvious objection
to this: the forests would be growing still faster, and absorbing more
CO2, if they weren’t being cut down.

Burdett’s argument gets short shrift from conservationists.

Danna
Smith, director of North Carolina’s Dogwood Alliance, said the pellet
industry increases the pressure to ‘over-harvest’ forests, as landowners
know they have a guaranteed market for material which they could not
otherwise sell: ‘It adds to the value they get from clear-cutting.’

Moreover,
she added, if this incentive did not exist, they would wait until the
smaller trees were big enough to cut for furniture and construction –
and all that time, they would be absorbing carbon.

A recent study
showed that bigger, older trees absorb more CO2 than saplings. As for
Drax’s claim that what counts is regrowth across the region, ‘that just
doesn’t capture what’s happening around the mills where they’re sourcing
the wood’.

According to a study by a team of academics,
published in December by Carter’s law centre, Enviva’s operations in
North Carolina ‘pose high risks to wildlife and biodiversity, especially
birds’.

The Roanoke wetlands are home to several rare or
endangered species: the World Wildlife Fund said in a report that the
forests constitute ‘some of the most biologically important habitats in
North America’ and constitute a ‘critical/endangered resource’.

Meanwhile,
in North Yorkshire, the sheer scale of Drax’s biomass operation is hard
to take in at first sight. Wood pellets are so much less dense than
coal, so Drax has had to commission the world’s biggest freight wagons
to move them by rail from the docks at Hull, Immingham and Port of Tyne.
Each car is more than 60ft high, and the 25-car trains are half a mile
long. On arrival, the pellets are stored in three of the world’s largest
domes, each 300ft high – built by lining colossal inflated polyurethane
balloons with concrete. Inside one of them, not yet in use, the
echo is impressive. Light filters in through slits in the roof, like a
giant version of the Pantheon church in Rome.

To date, only one
of Drax’s six turbine ‘units’ has been converted from coal to biomass:
another two are set to follow suit in the next two years. Eventually,
the firm says, its 3.6 gigawatt capacity – about five per cent of the UK
total – will be ‘predominantly’ biomass, burning seven million tons of
pellets a year.

From the domes, the pellets are carried along a
30ft-wide conveyor belt into a milling plant where they are ground to
powder. This is burnt in the furnaces, blown down into them by deafening
industrial fans.

All this has required an investment of
£700?million. Thanks to the green subsidies, this will soon be paid off.
Even if all Britain’s forests were devoted to Drax, they could not keep
its furnaces going. ‘We need areas with lots of wood, a reliable supply
chain,’ Mr Burdett said.

As well as Enviva, Drax buys wood from
other firms such as Georgia Biomass, which supplies mainly pine. It is
building new pellet-making plants in Mississippi and Louisiana.

Last
month, the Department of Energy and Climate Change issued new rules on
biomass sourcing, and will insist on strict monitoring to ensure there
really is ‘sustainability’.

In North Carolina, this will not be
easy: as Carter points out, there is very little local regulation. But
wouldn’t a much more effective and cheaper way of cutting emissions be
to shut down Drax altogether, and replace it with clean new gas plants –
which need no subsidy at all?

Mr Burdett said: ‘We develop our business plan in light of what the Government wants – not what might be nice.’

There
is no evidence genetically modified crops are dangerous and they may
even be more beneficial to health than natural produce, says
government's top science adviser

Genetically modified crops could
be more nutritious than natural produce, the government’s Chief
Scientific Adviser has told the Prime Minister.

Sir Mark Walport has written to David Cameron recommending that farmers should start to plant GM crops.

There is no scientific evidence to suggest that such crops are dangerous to humans or the environment, he says.

They could even be more beneficial to health, he argues. Scientists could add nutrients to the genetic make-up of plants.

They
would cut down on the need for pesticides and help farmers feed a
growing population at a time when global warming threatens climates.
“Extensive studies have failed to reveal any inherent risks to humans or
the environment,” said Sir Mark. “We take it for granted that because
our shelves and supermarkets are heaving with food that there are no
problems with food security. But we have limited land in the UK and
climate disruption and population growth are putting pressure on food
supply.”

GM crops have polarised opinion since they were first produced by American scientists in 1982.

Activists claim they could cause cancer, damage ecosystems and cross-pollinate with grasses to produce “super-weeds”.

No
GM crops are currently grown in Britain. Sir Mark is calling for a new
body to approve GM crop production on a case-by-case basis, in the same
way that the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence
regulates new drugs. Currently GM crops must be passed by the European
Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and then approved by the Advisory Committee
on Novel Foods and Processes — an independent body of scientific
experts.

But scientists have accused the EFSA of being increasingly “hostile” to GM plants.

However,
other academics said that the European Union regulations were
important. Prof Joe Perry, of the University of Greenwich, said: “The
regulatory process within the EU gives confidence to consumers.”

Previous
studies have suggested that some modified crops could cause tumours and
early death. But a report published on Thursday by academics from
Cambridge and Reading Universities ruled out any link to cancer.

A
spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
said the government was working to allow GM crops to be grown in
Britain.

They
pulled an all-nighter in the Senate on one of the coldest nights in DC,
after the coldest winter on record with over 55 new lows having been
recorded. They held their all-nighter not to discuss the Ukraine and the
invasion of the SECOND independent state by the smug thug in the
Kremlin; or a downed possibly-by-terrorism Malaysian airliner; they were
concerned not that more people will wind up uninsured than before
Obamacare began, or that a huge number of doctors are leaving with no
one who will replace them or to take Obamacare payments anyway; not
about the election in Florida that will turn congress Republican...(oh
yes, the Republican candidate won!)...but Climate Change.

Before
the AGW narrative took hold, I mean, the one cartoonists with a great
sense of humor at Walt Disney's studios created, the climate has never
changed. Every day the climate was exactly like the day before, the
month before, the year before - the same. The idea that climate is
capable of changing naturally as the deniers insist, is preposterous.

The
Ukraine is coming apart at the seams, 30,000 Russian troops wearing no
insignia (both the invasion and the no insignia is a violation of
international law) have invaded eastern Europe, and one Democratic
senator after another Democratic senator thought it proper to get up on
his soapbox with pre-prepared speeches from the White House, to talk at
length about the $50 million donation some hedgie offered to support the
narrative that Global Warming is "real." In other words, after having
already spent billions over the last decade trying to convince
unbelievers, aka infidels, by repeating it a million times that Global
Warming is real will make it so, the Democrats are looking to fund out
of the nation's treasury another round of AGW religious indoctrination
of the nation's citizens at taxpayer's expense.

Global Warming?
It's about money and if you thing it's about science, there's a really
cute pet DODO I can sell you. It talks and walks like a duck and
dispenses cash like an ATM.

The Democrats tell us that 98% of the
American people believe Global Warming is real - which must be true if
one had recalculated the US population where 98% of Americans were
democrats who lived in The Village or Palm Beach, and the nation's
Republicans are represented by the 2% who own penthouse pied a terres
next to The Donald's at Trump Towers. As it happens, only Democrats -
and no one else - actually believe the warming narrative the very year
after the planet had experienced a 60% polar ice cap growth; and after a
three ft. sheet of ice covered the North American continent and much of
the world too, for almost three months...

...which reminds me before I forget:

If
Global Warming were not a political, but a genuine scientific issue,
"settled science" as our president tells us just as convincingly as he
told us that "words have meaning" and that "You can keep your health
care plan; you can keep your doctors," I ask why is this story about a
global meltdown only believed by Democratic operatives and no one
else but Democrats hype it? Just asking, but then who am I
to ask anything?

Because it isn't political? Of course it's not political!

It's financial!

People
will make a lot of money in the world's largest redistributionist
scheme ever devised. Money from your pockets to theirs. They have a lot
of money riding on the AGW story, including the hedgie who will "donate"
$50 million to propagate it.

Indeed, we Americans do live in The
Twilight Zone, the epicenter is Congress, and with the all nighter in
mind, one can observe that DC is like a roach motel into which one can
check in, but one cannot check out.

Email from agbenjamin@gmail.com

China’s Shale Revolution Taking Shape As Production Surges More Than Fivefold

China,
which sits on the world’s largest shale reserves, may exceed its 2015
output goal, as a new project in the nation’s southwest and the promise
of fresh investment leave government targets looking outdated.

China
Petrochemical Corp., the parent of the listed company known as Sinopec,
agreed last week with local government to build shale gas capacity at
its Fuling site to 5 billion cubic meters a year by 2015. It suggests a
national target of 6.5 billion cubic meters will be met or surpassed.

“China
can easily beat the 2015 target, thanks largely to the accelerated pace
of development from Sinopec’s Fuling project,” said Shi Yan, an analyst
at UOB-Kay Hian Ltd. in Shanghai. Shi said contributions from other
shale producers could lift 2015 output as high as 10 billion cubic
meters.

While China’s reserves are almost double that of the
U.S., its production target is meager compared to U.S. output in 2012 of
266 billion cubic meters. High costs, difficult terrain and lack of
infrastructure have stunted development and cast doubt on whether even
its existing targets could be met. As concerns over coal-fired pollution
mount, the nation is pushing harder to unlock its potential shale
bonanza.

“China is on the way to achieve its 2015 target,
especially with the suddenly expanded capacity from Sinopec,” said
Gordon Kwan, regional head of oil and gas research at Nomura Holdings
Inc. in Hong Kong. He said PetroChina Co., the nation’s biggest oil and
gas company, may produce as much as 2 billion cubic meters of shale gas
in 2015.

Output Surge

China’s annual shale gas production
surged more than fivefold in 2013 to 200 million cubic meters a year,
according to the Land and Resources Ministry. The country consumed 169
billion cubic meters of gas in 2013, with about one third coming from
imports.

The Fuling project recorded daily production of 2.2
million cubic meters on March 2, up from 1.5 million cubic meters,
according to the Chongqing Daily, the official newspaper of the
municipality where Fuling is located. Sinopec Chairman Fu Chengyu said
the Fuling agreement signals the start of a “massive” development phase
for shale gas in China, according to a report on the land ministry’s
website on March 4.

At the National People’s Congress in Beijing,
which wraps up this week, both Fu and Zhou Jiping, the chairman of
PetroChina and its parent China National Petroleum Corp., said they
would open up shale development to private investment, as part of
government-driven reforms.

Collective Effort

The
collective effort makes the 2015 target achievable, said Neil Beveridge,
a senior research analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in Hong
Kong. However, it will still be “a bit of a stretch” to meet China’s far
more ambitious annual target of 60 billion to 100 billion cubic meters
by 2020, he said.

China holds 25.08 trillion cubic meters of
exploitable onshore shale-gas reserves, the land ministry said in March
2012. The U.S. has 13.65 trillion cubic meters of technically
recoverable gas from shale formations, its Energy Information
Administration said in January that year.

Richard
Branson, the CEO of Virgin, recently said that climate change deniers
should “get out of our way.” The comment comes after Apple CEO Tim Cook
said earlier this month that global warming skeptics should not buy
shares in his firm. But the Daily Caller pointed out that Branson’s
statement is, well, just a bit hypocritical to say the least.

Virgin CEO Richard Branson may be championing green business
investments but his airline empire has emitted more than 7.1 million
metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the years.

Branson recently took to his blog to decry global warming denialism,
saying that those who are skeptical of mankind’s effect on the planet
should “get out of our way.” But Branson’s own airline companies have
emitted millions of metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

I
think it’s a good time to revisit this video of filmmaker and journalist
Phelim McAleer pointing out the hypocrisy of environmentalists at the
UN Climate Change Conference in 2009.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

EU
politicians on Wednesday voted for tougher rules on exposing the
environmental impact of oil and conventional gas exploration, while
excluding shale gas.

Member states such as Britain and Poland are
pushing hard for the development of shale gas, seen as one way to
lessen dependence on Russian gas, as well as to lower energy costs as it
has in the United States.

The plenary vote of the European
Parliament in Strasbourg, France follows a compromise deal on the draft
law in December, which was struck only after negotiators agreed to leave
out references to shale gas.

Member states are expected to give their endorsement over the coming weeks, after which the law will become final.

Under
the planned law, assessments of a range of infrastructure projects, as
well as oil and gas, will include their impact on biodiversity and
climate change, plus measures to ensure authorities granting approval
have no conflict of interest.

Industry said the new law avoided
placing too many restrictions on projects during their early phases when
commercial viability is unclear.

"While not imposing unnecessary
requirements on the upstream oil and gas industry, the new rules will
guarantee that any development, including exploration for shale gas,
will be subject to strict environmental standards," Roland Festor,
director for EU affairs at the International Association of Oil &
Gas Producers, said.

Shale Gas Europe, which brings together companies such as Chevron, Total and Cuadrilla Resources, also welcomed the law.

"Shale
gas could potentially play an important role in meeting Europe's acute
energy challenges," Marcus Pepperell, spokesman for Shale Gas Europe,
said.

Green politicians, however, said the decision to leave out
shale gas was a major setback and that the fracking process, which
involves using chemicals to extract gas from the shale rock, posed risks
to health and the environment.

"The Greens believe there is
already sufficient evidence to ban fracking but ensuring informed permit
decisions through the environmental impact assessment procedure must be
the absolute minimum," Sandrine Belier, environment spokeswoman for the
European Greens, said.

Despite
the growing worldwide recognition that global warming—now called
climate change—is a hoax and that the Earth has been in a cooling cycle
going on seventeen years, those most responsible for it continue to put
forth baseless “science” about it.

The hoax has its base in the
United Nations which is home to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) and got its start with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 that
went into force in 2005. It limits “greenhouse gas” emissions, primarily
carbon dioxide (CO2). It purports that the gases are warming the Earth
and many nations signed on to reduce them. The U.S. did not and in 2011
Canada withdrew from it. Europe is suffering economically from the
billions it invested in “alternative energy” sources, wind and solar
power.

Five years ago, emails between a group of the United
Kingdom’s University of East Anglia scientists and others who were
generating computer models that “proved” global warming were revealed.
It was quickly dubbed “climategate” for the way the emails demonstrated
the manipulation of data claiming that global warming was real. They had
good reason to be worried, given the natural cooling cycle the Earth
has entered, but of even greater concern was the potential loss of
enormous amounts of money they were receiving for their deception.

To date, not one of theirs and other computer models “proving” global warming have been accurate.

On
Wednesday, March 10, The Wall Street Journal published an article,
“Scientists Say Four New Gases Threaten the Ozone.” It reported on
the latest effort of “scientists” at the United Kingdom’s University of
East Anglia and it is no coincidence that the university was the center
for the original IPCC data created to introduce and maintain the global
warming hoax.

“Traces of four previously undetected man-made
gases have been discovered in the atmosphere, where they are endangering
Earth’s protective ozone layer, a team of scientists from six countries
reported Sunday.”

Trace gases are those that represent less than
1% in the Earth's atmosphere. CO2, for example, represents a meager
0.038% of the atmosphere and represents no impact whatever on the
Earth’s climate. It is, however, vital to all life on Earth as it is the
"food" for all of its vegetation.

“The gases are of the sort
that are banned or being phased out under a global treaty to safeguard
the high altitude blanket of ozone that protects the planet from
dangerous ultraviolet radiation, experts said.” These “experts” failed
to mention that everywhere above the Earth’s active volcanoes the ozone
is naturally affected by their massive natural discharge of various
gases. The oceans routinely absorb and discharge CO2 to maintain a
balance. The bans included the gas used primarily in air conditioners
and for refrigeration. It has since been replaced.

Another gas
that was banned is a byproduct of chemicals called pyrethroids that “are
often used in household insecticides.” Banning insecticides is a great
way of reducing the Earth’s population as insects spread diseases and
destroy property. Ironically, termites produce massive amounts of carbon
dioxide.

The means used to detect the gases included comparing
“the atmosphere today to old air trapped in annual layers of Greenland
snow” and they also studied “air collected by high altitude research
aircraft and by sensors aboard routine passenger jet flights around the
world.” Not mentioned is the fact that the Earth has had higher amounts
of CO2 in earlier times which posed no threat to it, so a few trace
gases hardly represent a “threat.”

This kind of questionable
“science” was practiced by one of the most well-known of the East Anglia
scientists, an American scientist named Michael Mann, who used tree
ring data to prove a massive, sudden increase in CO2 in his “hockey
stick” graph that has since been debunked by skeptical scientists.

Mann
has brought a libel law suit against columnist Mark Steyn, the National
Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, charging defamation.
Such suits cost a lot of money and Robert Tracinski, writing in Real
Clear Politics in February noted that “it’s interesting that no one asks
who is going to go bankrupt funding Mann’s lawsuit. Who is insuring
Mann against this loss?”

Tracinski pointed out that “It is libel
to maliciously fabricate facts about someone” but that it is “legal for
me, for example, to say that Michael Mann is a liar, if I don’t believe
his erroneous scientific conclusions are the product of honest error. It
is also legal for me to say that he is a coward and a liar, for hiding
behind libel laws in an attempt to suppress criticism.” The East Anglia
emails revealed that they were doing whatever they could to suppress the
publication of studies that disputed global warming in various science
journals.

How specious is this latest announcement about trace
gases that they assert are a threat to the ozone layer? An atmospheric
chemist, Johannes Laube of the East Anglia group making the
announcement, was quoted as saying “We are not able to pinpoint any
sources” for the trace gases. “We are not able to point a finger.”

The
objective of the announcement is the same as the creation of the entire
global warming hoax. It provides the basis for the transfer of funds
between developed and undeveloped nations and would grant greater power
to the United Nations to reduce the world’s manufacturing base while
endangering and controlling the lives of everyone on Earth.

Is
the latest “research” a lie? The data it cites has some basis in fact,
but those facts are an excuse, like those cited about greenhouse gases,
to frighten nations into wasting billions on climate threats that do not
exist. The real threats remain climate events over which mankind never
has and never will have any control.

“… efficiency and renewables are not causing carbon emissions to
decline – on the contrary, emissions are growing rapidly [because of
demand growth]. This situation was predictable.”

“Foundations and major environmental organizations (“greens”) are
pretty much on the same page, so don’t expect to get support if you
question their position. Instead, expect to be attacked.”

“[Green] groups have scientists on their staffs, but they do not act
like scientists, continually questioning their own position with an open
mind. Instead, like scientist-deniers, renewables-can-do-all scientists
act like talking-head lawyers hired to defend a predetermined
position.”

“I used to think that [greens]
would change their tune as a little more empirical data on energy use
accumulated. Instead, like climate-deniers, they cherry-pick data,
concluding that we are on the verge of renewables providing all of our
energy.”

“The Koch brothers could not purchase
such powerful support for their enterprise. The renewables-can-do-all
greens are combining with the fossil industry to lock-in widespread
expansion of fracking.”

“Courageous actions to
block mountaintop removal, tar sands pipelines, destructive long-wall
mining and all such things will be in vain without adequate energy
alternatives. Obama is not supporting fossil fuels because he loves
them. He does not have adequate alternatives.”

“Greens fanatically support an anti-nuclear-power agenda, asserting
that even low level radiation is harmful to human health, an assertion
that is not supported unequivocally by scientific evidence.”

Pick
up a copy of Obama’s $3.9 trillion budget and there among the TSA fee
hikes, Medicare payment cuts and the $400 million for the Department of
Homeland Security to fight global warming is a curious little item.

On
Page 930 of the budget that never ends is $575 million for “family
planning/reproductive health” worldwide especially in “areas where
population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species.”

The
idea that the way to protect insects, fish and animals is by preventing
human beings from having children is part of an approach known as
Population, Health and Environment (PHE) which integrates population
control into environmentalist initiatives.

PHE dates back to the
1980s and is practiced by mainstream organizations such as the World
Wildlife Fund. The Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson Center, which is funded
partly by the US government, aggressively champions PHE eugenics and
USAID funds PHE programs and distributes PHE training manuals derived in
part from Wilson Center materials.

PHE had been baked into
congressional bills such as the Global Sexual and Reproductive Health
Act of 2013 co-sponsored by Debbie Wasserman-Shultz and Sheila
Jackson-Lee which urged meeting United Nations Millennium Development
Goals by using birth control as, among other things, a means of
“ensuring environmental sustainability.”

Obama’s budget is more
open about its PHE eugenics agenda. While PHE backers usually claim that
they want to reduce population to prevent famine and promote gender
equality, the budget explicitly states that its goal is to reduce human
population growth for the sake of the animals, without any of the usual
misleading language about feminism and clean water.

The budget is
a blunt assertion of post-human values by an administration that has
become notorious for its fanatical environmentalism, sacrificing people
on the altar of Green ideology.

When Obama’s Interior Secretary
Sally Jewell visited Alaska, she told the residents of an Eskimo village
where nineteen people had died due to the difficulty of evacuating
patients during medical emergencies that, “I’ve listened to your
stories, now I have to listen to the animals.”

Jewell rejected
the road that they needed to save lives because it would inconvenience
the local waterfowl. When it came to choosing between the people and the
ducks, Jewell chose the ducks.

Ducks don’t talk, but
environmentalists do, and they had vocally opposed helping the people of
King Cove. Jewell had received the Rachel Carson Award, named after an
environmentalist hero whose fearmongering killed millions. Compared to
the Carson malaria graveyards of Africa, nineteen dead Eskimos slide off
the post-human conscience of a fanatical environmentalist like water
off a duck’s back.

USAID, which played a key role in the war on
DDT, has openly embraced PHE. The arguments against DDT often focused
not on saving lives, but on taking them. PHE prevents children from
being born, but environmentalists don’t stop with the unborn. Malaria
was an even more effective tool for reducing populations.

Environmentalist
population reduction activists originally cloaked their real agenda in
claims about worldwide famine. Paul Erlich, author of “The Population
Bomb,” had predicted mass starvation by the 1970s and the end of England
by 2000. Today Global Warming activists set empty dates for the
destruction of mankind that they themselves don’t believe in.

The
post-human left seeks to maintain a state of perpetual crisis so that
governments and corporations will be more inclined to accept even the
most horrifying solutions to avoid the end of mankind. What it does not
tell them is that its goal is the end of mankind.

In February,
Population Action International and the Sierra Club sponsored a
congressional briefing on PHE post-2015. Population Action International
was originally founded as the Population Crisis Committee in the
sixties. Its preceding organizations included the Hugh Moore Fund for
International Peace which claimed that population control was necessary
to defeat Communism.

Like the Communists, the post-human
activists were adept at disguising their agenda in the concerns of the
moment, shifting from national security, feminism, the coming Ice Age,
mass starvation and now Global Warming.

Environmentalists are
even attempting to shoehorn the War on Terror into their agenda as the
Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program attempts to
tie every terrorist conflict zone to global warming.

Environmentalist
fearmongering has never been about saving people. Its activists, like
Sally Jewell, are too busy playing duck whisperer to care about people.

Green
programs have yet to save lives, but they do cost lives. The elderly in
the United Kingdom are dying of electric poverty after facing cold
winters and shocking price increases due to sustainability mandates,
asthma sufferers are dying because the affordable albuterol inhalers
they used were banned by the EPA, and people die in fires and floods, in
natural disasters that could have been prevented, but are instead
blamed on their victims by the environmentalists, who helped make them
so lethal.

Not only do environmentalists kill, but they also profit from the deaths of their victims.

Elliot
Morley, UK Labour’s Chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Select
Committee, had directed that flooding in Somerset should be promoted
because “wildlife will benefit from increased water levels.” Baroness
Young, an environmental activist, who had become the chief executive of
the UK’s Environment Agency, took steps to increase the possibility of
flooding.

As she said, the formula was “for ‘instant wildlife, just add water.’”

When
the flooding came, children were trapped on buses, 7,000 homes were
flooded and many residents lost everything. Environmental activists
blamed global warming and “careless farming” for the floods that they
themselves had engineered.

Survivors of the Black Saturday
bushfires in Australia which killed 173 people blamed environmental
regulations for worsening the fires by preventing residents from
clearing trees. The environmentalists blamed global warming and sent
around an editorial suggesting that people “who don’t like to end up in
flames” should read the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change
report.

California’s drought was likewise engineered by environmental activists who then blamed their own handiwork on global warming.

Environmentalists
wield unprecedented power over the lives of millions and yet they claim
that each engineered disaster could have been averted if they had only
been given even more power.

The left is not only becoming
post-American or post-Western, but post-human, applying the same tactics
that they used to target majorities in Western countries to the human
race as a whole. Class war and race war are giving way to species
warfare. And since the ducks cannot talk, ultimate power rests with the
duck whisperers, those who speak for the animals, the fish and the
trees.

The post-human left takes social justice to its natural
conclusion, going beyond all the human categories to level mankind with
the polar bear, the duck and the microbe. Total equality for the
post-human left is not the equality of the rich and the poor, of men and
women, of blacks and whites, or even of the First World and the Third
World, but the equality of man and microbe, of a pregnant woman in a
small Alaskan fishing village with a duck and a hungry California child
with the Kangaroo rat.

The post-Human left seeks to put the
species in its place. That is the final endgame of the environmentalist
movement. It isn’t out to save mankind; it’s out to destroy it.

UK
Government Chief Scientist, Sir Mark Walport, has been testifying
before the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee. His only skill
seems to be name-calling.

Another entertaining episode in
the hearings this morning was where Mark Walport was asked about Matt
Ridley's suggestion that global warming would bring net benefits over
40-50 years. This conclusion is based on Richard Tol's metaanalysis of
mainstream economic studies into such questions. In response to
this, Walport had this to say:

"I understand the point [Ridley]
is trying to make but I think he's completely wrong unfortunately. While
there might be trivial benefits in some parts of the world for some of
the time the long term direction for all of us is a negative direction.
And frankly I think he is...he described himself as a "rational
optimist". I'm not sure about the rational bit."

I wonder if
Walport has any actual evidence to support his position that Ridley is
wrong. The words read like our chief scientist substituting name-calling
for a lack of evidence.

Update:

In the comments, Matt Ridley reveals that he has written to Walport, who is signally failing to substantiate his remarks.

Viscount Ridley adds:

I sent this email to Sir Mark Walport:

Dear Mark,

I
see that this morning in testifying to the Energy and Climate Change
Committee in answer to a question from Graham Stringer MP you described
my reporting on studies of the benefits of climate change as "completely
wrong" and me as not rational. You will understand that I find these
charges damaging to my standing as a journalist and author who takes
great care with his research. I also find them surprising coming from
somebody who I consider a friend.

It is possible that you had not
read my article on the benefits of climate change directly, but had
relied on second-hand accounts of it, in which case I can understand how
you came to be misled. If so, you can read it here,
with links to sources, together with some detailed responses that I
made to ill-informed criticisms of the article. My article states:

"There
are many likely effects of climate change: positive and negative,
economic and ecological, humanitarian and financial. And if you
aggregate them all, the overall effect is positive today — and likely to
stay positive until around 2080. That was the conclusion of Professor
Richard Tol of Sussex University after he reviewed 14 different studies
of the effects of future climate trends."

Are you saying that the
academic, peer-reviewed work by these 14 teams, and the meta-analysis
of them by Richard Tol, as well as all the other studies I cited in my
article, are all "completely wrong"? Or are you arguing that my
reporting of this work was "completely wrong"? Professor Tol thinks my
reporting of his paper was accurate, and none of the other authors have
objected, so the second charge is certainly unfair.

I know you
are busy, but please may we meet to discuss this matter? I am available
in the House of Lords on a regular basis. I emailed you on a previous
occasion on 13 January, after your letter to the Times, but did not
receive a response. I would be grateful if you would acknowledge this
email at the very least so that I know it has reached you.

Yours sincerely

Matt

I
received a reply in which he did not address the question of why he
thought I was "completely wrong" but agreed to set up a meeting.
However, his criticism remains on the record, so I have asked him to
withdraw it.

"California’s
record-breaking drought. Britain’s record-breaking floods. Australia’s
unprecedented heat wave. And the polar vortex, times three. The only
thing that matched the degree of extreme weather we saw this past winter
was the extreme amount of climate denial that arose in response" -- from "Climate buffoons’ real motives: 5 reasons they still spout debunked garbage" in Salon

Quite
a righteous opening, but factually challenged. Every week brings many
similar articles, all examples of the Left’s abandonment of the IPCC,
the major climate agencies, and of climate science. Let’s review
the evidence rebuking Ms Abrams’ alarmist rhetoric.

(2) About those droughts

California
and Australia have histories of frequent, severe, and long droughts.
Droughts worse and longer than recent ones. More generally, the
consensus of climate scientists is clear about the global trend in
droughts.

"Similarly,
long-term trends (1925-2003) of hydrologic droughts based on model
derived soil moisture and runoff show that droughts have, for the most
part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the
U. S. over the last century (Andreadis and Lettenmaier, 2006). The main
exception is the Southwest and parts of the interior of the West, where
increased temperature has led to rising drought trends (Groisman et al. ,
2004; Andreadis and Lettenmaier, 2006). The trends averaged over all of
North America since 1950 (Figure 2.6) are similar to U.S. trends for
the same period, indicating no overall trend."

(b) From
page 8 of the IPCC’s “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters
to Advance Climate Change Adaptation” (SREX, 2012)

"There is
medium confidence that since the 1950s some regions of the world
have experienced a trend to more intense and longer droughts, in
particular in southern Europe and West Africa, but in some regions
droughts have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, for
example, in central North America and northwestern Australia. [3.5.1]"

(c) From the new IPCC AR5, Working Group I, Chapter 2:

"Confidence
is low for a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of
rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century, owing to lack of direct
observations, methodological uncertainties and geographical
inconsistencies in the trends. Based on updated studies, AR4 conclusions
regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were
probably overstated. However, this masks important regional changes: the
frequency and intensity of drought have likely increased in the
Mediterranean and West Africa and likely decreased in central North
America and north-west Australia since 1950. {2.6.2.2}"

There is, of course, ample research supporting these conclusions.

(d)
A broad explanation: “Historical drought trends revisited“, Sonia I.
Seneviratne, Nature, 15 November 2012 — “A new assessment of drought
trends over the past 60 years finds little evidence of an expansion of
the area affected by droughts, contradicting several previous
estimates.”

(e) One study, with a more technical analysis:
“Little change in global drought over the past 60 years“, Justin
Sheffield et al, Nature, 15 November 2012 — From the abstract:

"Drought
is expected to increase in frequency and severity in the future as a
result of climate change, mainly as a consequence of decreases in
regional precipitation but also because of increasing evaporation driven
by global warming. … More realistic calculations, based on the
underlying physical principles that take into account changes in
available energy, humidity and wind speed, suggest that there has been
little change in drought over the past 60 years."

(f) What are the worst drought months in America from 1900 to March 2013?

Top months with the greatest extent of Moderate–Extreme on the Palmer Drought Index. (Source here)

(a) In February the UK Met Office issued a special report about the UK storms:

"As
yet, there is no definitive answer on the possible contribution of
climate change to the recent storminess, rainfall amounts and the
consequent flooding. This is in part due to the highly variable nature
of UK weather and climate."

(b) From the new IPCC AR5, Working Group I, Chapter 2: Floods {2.6.2.2}

AR4
WGI Chapter 3 (Trenberth et al., 2007) did not assess changes in floods
but AR4 WGII concluded that there was not a general global trend in the
incidence of floods (Kundzewicz et al., 2007). SREX went further to
suggest that there was low agreement and thus low confidence at the
global scale regarding changes in the magnitude or frequency of floods
or even the sign of changes.

… In summary, there continues to be a
lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in
the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

13 March, 2014

Guacamole Crisis Dissolves Like other Global Warming Myths

James M. Taylor

Chipotle
Mexican restaurants reported it is experiencing no shortage of
avocadoes, putting an end to the latest mythical global warming crisis
just hours after it began.

Chipotle made international news
Tuesday when it strategized in its annual report that it may choose to
respond to spikes in salsa or guacamole ingredients by temporarily not
offering salsa or guacamole with its dishes. The annual report
speculated weather volatility or global warming might be potential
causes of such price spikes.

No sooner did global warming
activists report with glee that they had discovered a climate change
crisis than Chipotle put a damper on the alarmist claims. Chipotle
reported it has experienced no avocado or guacamole problems. Instead,
ingredients for salsa and guacamole have been plentifully available.

"As
a public company ... we are required to disclose any potential issues
that could have potential impact on our business, and we do that very
thoroughly,” Chipotle explained to the Los Angeles Times.

Chipotle’s
explanation embarrassed global warming activists and their media
allies, who had already begun spreading the Chicken Little alarm that
avocadoes were falling from the sky.

“Chipotle’s Climate Change Warning: Guacamole Could Be at Stake,” warned the Huffington Post.

As
I documented last year in an article for Forbes.com, global warming is
substantially improving growing conditions at the national and global
level for virtually all crops. Increasing soil moisture, longer growing
seasons, and the beneficial fertilizing effects of atmospheric carbon
dioxide are causing a dramatic long-term rise in crop production.

The
Obama administration’s anti-energy policies empower Russia aggression
and take away America’s ability to respond, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)
explained in a Time magazine editorial. Paul said America has all the
means to deter and punish Russian military aggression without the use of
American military force but the Obama administration has taken
important economic weapons off the table with its anti-energy policies.

Vladimir
Putin violated international law by invading the Ukraine, Paul noted.
The senator from Kentucky insisted the United States should take the
lead role in deterring and responding to such aggression. Paul outlined
several potent economic weapons at the United States’ disposal, many of
which draw upon our prodigious energy resources.

One economic weapon would be taking decisive stepts to eliminate Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and natural gas.

“I
would do everything in my power to aggressively market and export
America’s vast natural gas resources to Europe,” said Paul. “I would
immediately remove every obstacle or current ban blocking the export of
American oil and gas to Europe, and I would lift restrictions on new oil
and gas development in order to ensure a steady energy supply at home
and so we can supply Europe with oil if it is interrupted from Ukraine.”

“Because
of so many of our current needless laws and regulations, President
Obama has left Europe completely vulnerable because of its dependence on
Russian oil and gas,” Paul explained.

Paul observed that building the Keystone Pipeline would bolster America’s supply of oil from friendly nations.

“I would support immediate construction of the Keystone Pipeline,” said Paul.

“The
Budapest Memorandum said that Russia wouldn’t violate the integrity of
Ukraine, but now it has,” Paul explained. “There is no realistic
military option in this conflict, at least for the U.S. But this does
not mean there aren’t options, many of which I’ve outlined here. The
real problem is that Russia’s President is not currently fearful or
threatened in any way by America’s President, despite his country’s
blatant aggression. But let me be clear: If I were President, I wouldn’t
let Vladimir Putin get away with it.”

Monday
night in the U.S. Senate, something historic happened. Democrats took
to the floor and demanded…um…nothing, really. And they weren’t going to
leave until…they felt like it, I guess. That was the gist of the PR
stunt known as “#Up4Climate” on Twitter.

It was a filibuster that
wasn’t really a filibuster that sought to draw attention to an issue
progressives have deemed so important they have not offered or attempted
to pass anything on since they took control of the Senate in 2007.
That’s right, Senate Democrats have no legislation to address the coming
“doom” they predict from the Artist Formerly Known As Global Warming.
They just wanted to draw attention to it.

The Artist Formerly
Known As Global Warming has been lingering near toenail fungus and the
Canadian Football League Championship on the list of concerns for
Americans. This presents a problem for Democrats. They raise millions in
campaign cash from rich donors who stand to make billions from
subsidies from so-called “green energy” scams, er, “investments” from
government. It’s one hand washing the other, then stealing your wallet.
Lather, rinse, repeat.

Normally Democrats wouldn’t waste their
time with speeches after midnight that no one will watch on an issue no
one cares about. But this dog and pony show had an audience of one –
progressive sugar daddy Tom Steyer. It was such an obvious
dance-for-campaign-cash that even the Washington Post said “There is
another more political reason for the decision by Senate Democrats to
devote their time to the issue right now. And that issue is campaign
cash.” And there’s a lot of cash at stake, for everyone involved.

Tom
Steyer is a hedge fund billionaire who made a fortune in oil and now
spends his time and money trying to purge himself of the guilt he feels
for the “harm” he’s done. He does this by buying politicians to force
Americans to live how he wants them to live and to make a fortune in the
process. He could just write a check to charity, but that would mean
he’s genuinely interested in helping others rather than his investments
return a healthy, taxpayer-provided profit. Everything progressives
accuse Charles and David Koch of being Tom Steyer is.

Steyer is
invested in “green” technologies and companies that simply do not work,
at least not yet on the scale needed to replace current energy sources.
They may some day, but not today.

But when you have billions
there’s no need to wait for an investment to mature and be able to meet
the needs of the market. You can just buy a political party, have it
mandate people use your product and then collect subsidies along the
way. Spending $100 million to elect Democrats who will make his will law
seems like an insane proposition to a normal person, but normal people
don’t generally become billionaires. Steyer isn’t taking a risk, he’s
making an investment. And there’s no investment with a better return
than politicians in Washington.

Steyer isn’t buying
free-thinkers. He’s buying an army of progressive flying monkeys to
force the use of his product and acceptance of his will on 330 million
people. Although $100 million seems like a lot, it’s a drop in the
Pacific Ocean compared to what success would return. Solar panels and
windmills can’t compete with oil and coal for cost, reliability and
efficiency, so people don’t use them. That’s the free-market. That’s why
Steyer and the other “watermelons” (green on the outside, red on the
inside) want government to give them money to build their businesses
(risk is for suckers), then obligate everyone to use their product.

It’s
exactly how the iPhone was developed, minus the subsidies and the
forced purchases. Apple took a risk and created a product it thought
people would want and buy. If people hadn’t bought it, Apple would’ve
lost billions. But people did want it, and Apple made hundreds of
billions. No one was forced to buy it. In fact, people slept outside
Apple stores voluntarily to buy it.

If an energy source could be
created that ran cars and light bulbs on hope and good vibes, people
would be lining up to spend whatever it cost to buy it. Just like people
would slap a solar panel and a windmill on their house in a second if
it could do more than eventually partially toast a piece of bread. But
if the cost of electricity could be taxed and regulated to unaffordable
levels, alternatives, no matter how shoddy, would skyrocket in value.

That’s
the problem with people such as Steyer. They’re anti-free-market,
anti-opportunity, anti-that which made them successful, and they’re
anti-American. That last one is harsh but perfectly accurate.

The
Koch brothers, often accused by progressives as being anti-American,
support organizations and a political philosophy that seeks to get
government to leave people alone and allow them to earn what they can
within the law and without harming others.

The Steyers of the
world “invest” in politicians explicitly to not leave people alone. The
politicians he invests in seek to control others, tax them, then take a
slice of that tax pie and require the use of their products to get an
even bigger pie all for themselves. Anti-American is the perfect word
for that, but if you prefer another feel free to pick from a list of so
many littered throughout history that end with “ism.” Or simply call it
“progressive.”

The
day after Senate Democrats pulled an all-nighter in an attempt to
recruit new climate-change believers, a Gallup poll says the American
people aren't that worried about climate change.

Only 24 percent
of Americans say they worry a great deal about climate change, Gallup
found. In fact, both "climate change" and "quality of the environment"
were near the bottom of a list of 15 issues Gallup asked Americans to
rate.

Only "race relations" ranked lower than those two issues in Gallup's March 6-9 survey.

The
majority of Americans say they worry about climate change and quality
of the environment "only a little" or "not at all"; but more than half
of Americans worry about the other 13 issues at least "a fair amount."

At the top of the list in this election year were the economy, federal spending, and health care.

Speaking
on the Senate floor Tuesday, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell
questioned what the Democrats had accomplished with their all-night
talkathon. He called it an "empty political stunt."

Democrats, who control the Senate, didn't introduce new legislation, nor did they announce a vote on any pending bills.

"They
basically just talked. And talked. And tossed out political attacks at a
party that doesn't even control the Democrat-run Senate. No wonder the
American people have such a low opinion of Congress."

McConnell
said the nation needs "two serious political parties in this country,
debating serious ideas. When we see Washington Democrats throwing
seriousness out the window like this, it's just bad for everyone."

If
Democrats are really serious, they could -- and should bring up a
"cap-and-tax" bill. "Let's have a debate," said McConnell, who opposes
cap-and-trade.

But they won't do it, he added, "because too many members of their own party would vote against it."

McConnell
said the American people don't want a "national energy tax" that would
boost their utility bills. But he said Americans do want an end to the
"jobs crisis."

"If only our friends on the other side were
willing to talk a little less and work with us a little more, there's so
much we could get done on that front.

Unhappy
with their inability to halt the nation's growing oil and gas industry,
envirofascists are pushing the Department of the Interior to add a
record 757 new species to the Endangered Species Act in an attempt to
close off 50 to 100 million acres to any kind of economic development.
One bird for which they seek “protection” is the sage grouse, which is
found in 11 western states, raising the question that if it lives in
such a wide swath of territory, just how endangered can it be?

That
is a question Interior refuses to answer. Like many of its studies over
the years that have led to numerous additions to the ESA list, the
department won't divulge the method by which it arrives at its decisions
to define animals as endangered. A recent report put together by 13
House members and led by Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc
Hastings details numerous discrepancies in ESA research, including the
use of selective data, biased sampling, inaccurate mapping and
subjective interpretation of results.

The shoddy research stands
unchallenged because environmental groups use a “sue and settle”
strategy that basically floods the government with lawsuits that are
more easily settled out of court than challenged on the merits. Two
groups, Wildlife Guardians and the Center for Biological Diversity, have
been involved in more than 1,000 such lawsuits since 1990. Their aim is
nothing short of ending fossil-fuel production in the United States.
Their tactics have become so brazen that even Democrats like Senator
Harry Reid and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper have complained that
adding the sage grouse to the ESA list will have a massively negative
economic impact on their respective states. Whether they will do
anything about it is another story.

According to the Department
of the Interior, the sage grouse and the prairie chicken, another
potential addition to the list of endangered species, have habitats near
the Bakken Shale fields of North Dakota and the Permian Basin in Texas,
respectively. If the department's actions go unchallenged, these huge
sources of fossil fuels could be essentially cut off from development.
If the “science” of the environmentalists is as solid as they claim,
then they should be called upon to defend their findings in an open
forum. Let the facts speak for themselves, if they can.

Fraud
and deceit in the usual Greenie way. Formerly John Gummer, Lord
Deben is a prominent member of many Greenie organizations so he cannot
afford to confront the facts -- JR

by Matt Ridley.

Lord
Deben is chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, a body funded by
the British taxpayer. He draws a salary of more than £35,000 from you
and me. On the masthead of its website the committee claims to give “a
balanced response to the risks of climate change” and “independent,
evidence-based advice to the UK government and Parliament”.

Yet
the committee consists entirely of people who think climate change will
be dangerous; no sceptics or lukewarmers are on it, even though most
hold views that are well within the “consensus” of climate science.
Under Deben’s chairmanship since 2012 its pronouncements have become
increasingly one-sided. Deben himself is frequently highly critical of
any sceptics, often mischaracterizing them as “deniers” or “dismissers”,
but has never to my knowledge been heard to criticize anybody for
exaggerating climate alarm and the harm it can do to disadvantaged
people. These are not the actions of an impartial chairman.

In
the past year, as I shall detail, Lord Deben has three times launched
sharp criticisms of me for arguing that some climate change projections
are exaggerated. In each case, I have replied with detailed rebuttals
based on peer-reviewed scientific literature to show that his criticisms
were wrong, but my replies have been dismissed or ignored by Lord
Deben. I suppose I should be flattered that this vendetta against me
indicates that he clearly feels that my arguments threaten some part of
his agenda. But on this third occasion he has sunk to a new low.

On
28 October 2013, I made a speech in the House of Lords in which I gave
“nine separate examples of ways in which the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change has retreated to a slightly less alarming and less
certain position than six years ago”. Notice first that this was a very
mild claim. I was not saying there was no cause for alarm in the new
report of the IPCC. I was not even saying that overall the document was
less alarming (though in my judgment, it is). I was merely saying that
in nine instances, it was “slightly” less alarming than in the previous
report.

In other words, I was not adopting a position of denial,
or even of skepticism. I was adopting, as I usually do, a “lukewarm”
position: that there is a strong chance that climate change will happen
but will be comparatively mild and slow and may well do less harm than
the policies promoted in its name. The IPCC is slowly coming closer to
this position in its main reports. My nine examples show this clearly.
AR5 has acknowledged:

the recent “hiatus” in temperatures;

the likelihood that medieval temperatures may have been as high as today’s;

the unpredicted increase in Antarctic sea ice;

that 111 of 114 models had predicted too much warming over recent years

that the low end of equilibrium climate sensitivity is lower;

that the high end of transient climate response is lower;

that likely sea level rise is not as high as some experts have forecast

that collapses of the Gulf Stream, of Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets
or of methane clathrates are “very unlikely” ;

that there is “low confidence” in the collapse of tropical forests, of
boreal forests and of the monsoon, an explosion of greenhouse gases from
the Arctic permafrost and an increase in megadroughts.

All in
all, it is not unreasonable for an intelligent reader of the AR5 report
to conclude that in these nine respects, the IPCC is reflecting the fact
that scientists are slightly less alarmed or certain than they were six
years before. I am not the only person to have reached this conclusion.
Professor Judith Curry, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric
Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, testifying to the
Senate recently went considerably further than I did:

Multiple lines of evidence presented in the IPCC AR5 WG1 report suggest
that the case for anthropogenic warming is weaker than the previous
assessment AR4 in 2007.

A chairman of a Committee on Climate
Change and who read my speech might decide to argue with me, and might
even commission a report from an expert to assess my claims. He would
however (1) tell me he was doing so; (2) seek my response; (3) tell me
he was publishing the report on my speech; (4) publish the name of the
author(s) of the report on my speech. He may not be under any legal
obligation to do these things; but he would be under a moral one.

Lord
Deben chose to do none of these four things. He did not have the
courtesy to tell me he was commissioning a report, despite seeing me
regularly in the House of Lords. He did not have the caution to ask for a
response in case his report had missed an important source I had used.
He did not have the manners to tell me the report had been published. He
did not have the courage to put the report’s author’s name on it.

I
came across the report by accident one day, when checking something
else on the Committee’s website. I immediately wrote to Lord Deben
(letter here) asking him a set of specific questions and giving a
detailed response to his report. I pointed out that his report had
several errors. The most striking was that in quoting the IPCC AR5
report they had cut some words and numbers out of a sentence. Those
words and numbers were the very ones that proved me right, by showing no
warming during the past 15 years. The only reason for excising these
words and numbers was plainly to alter the sense of the sentence to mean
something other than what it plainly said.

...the rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998–2012; 0.05 [–0.05 to
+0.15] °C per decade), which begins with a strong El Nino, is smaller
than the rate calculated since 1951.

The words in bold were omitted.

In
more than 30 years of science reporting I have never come across such a
deceitful trick, let alone in an official government document. It is
the sort of thing I might have expected to find coming from some of the
more rabid and intolerant activist green groups, yet I do not think even
they would stoop this low. Yet this was only one way in which the
anonymous author of the report on my speech had cherry-picked, omitted,
mined and distorted the words of the IPCC to try to imply that I was
wrong in my moderate and careful assessment that in nine respects there
is “slightly” less alarm in AR5 than there was in AR4.

I received
a reply from Lord Deben that was dismissive and empty (see attached).
He answered none of my questions, addressed none of my points and merely
reasserted his right to commission such reports – a point I had not
challenged. Having given him the opportunity to respond to my questions,
which he has spurned, I am now prepared to go public.

So I am
now publishing this account of the sorry saga, so that readers can
decide for themselves whether my original speech was fair, whether the
criticisms made by Lord Deben’s anonymous report were fair, and whether
this is an appropriate way for a public servant to have behaved. I am
putting it in the public domain so that, if others share my concerns
about the bias of the Committee on Climate Change they can raise them
with the committee themselves.

It would be interesting to ask:
Who wrote this document? Why was it published without informing me? Why
were key words omitted from key sentences in quotations? Why does the
committee never challenge exaggerations in the same way as it challenges
those arguing that climate change is moderate? How much did the
preparation of this report cost? Why was I given no right of reply? Why
did Lord Deben refuse to post my response to his report on his website?
If you do raise these questions, please be polite, be factually accurate
and be brief. And, as always, please quote exactly the words I or
others used, not some paraphrase of them.

My recent experience,
of being smeared in an inaccurate way about this topic of climate change
policy by somebody employed in a public body is not unique. The same
thing has happened to Roger Pielke Jr recently at the hands of Dr John
Holdren, to Nic Lewis, Donna Laframboise and Dick Lindzen recently at
the hands of Bob Ward, and to Bjorn Lomborg and Richard Tol also at the
hands of Bob Ward. Not forgetting Ward’s attacks on Bishop Hill.

As
I mentioned above, this is not the first time I have been attacked by
Lord Deben. About a year ago, in a lecture in Oxford he mocked me for
having a doctorate in biology (he has an English degree), and falsely
charged – on the basis of a blog post written by a novelist (!) – that I
had not cited the mainstream scientific literature when writing about
ocean acidification. In fact in the relevant passage I had included
direct quotations from 17 papers in the mainstream scientific
literature, including a major meta-analysis of 372 peer-reviewed papers.
Despite being requested twice to do so, Lord Deben declined to write to
the organisers of the lecture to correct his mistake.

Later he
wrote to fellow peers following a debate in the House of Lords saying
that the “facts that were presented [by me in a speech] would be denied
by almost every climatologist in the world”. I replied with direct
quotations to show that I was citing mainstream scientific publications
in every item of my speech. He ignored my letter.

In taking part
in the debate on climate change over more than 25 years I have always
tried to act with good manners, despite severe provocation. When I first
covered this topic, I accepted alarming projections on trust. Since
becoming more sceptical of exaggerated claims, I am used to being
abused, ridiculed, smeared and inaccurately misquoted not only by
amateur bloggers but by senior scientists and politicians and their spin
doctors. I try never to respond in kind. The rudeness of the climate
establishment towards anybody who argues for moderation is quite
extraordinary, but I do not believe in emulating it. On Twitter Lord
Deben has recently criticised sceptics for their rudeness. He should
look in the mirror.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

12 March, 2014

Correlation is causation? Don't be misled by Petr Chylek

It's
sort of pesky to be a former teacher of research methods and
statistics. It means that you see huge faults in what is published
as science. Scientists very often don't observe the basic
precautions that people such as I have attempted to inculcate in
students. I see it in my own field of social science research, I
see it in the medical journals, I see it in climate science journals.

And
one of the biggest holes that I see in published research is that the
writers ignore just about the first thing you are told in any statistics
course: That correlation is not causation. Just because two
things go together in some way, does not mean one causes the
other. They may both be effects of some underlying third factor or
their association might be just a random event.

Let me point out
a recent example in climatology: The article "The Atlantic Multidecadal
Oscillation as a dominant factor of oceanic influence on climate'
by Chylek et al. It is one of the most recent articles
appearing in "Geophysical Research Letters", a major climatology
journal. Here is the Abstract:

"A multiple linear
regression analysis of global annual mean near-surface air temperature
(1900-2012) using the known radiative forcing and the El Ni¤o-Southern
Oscillation index as explanatory variables account for 89% of the
observed temperature variance. When the Atlantic Multidecadal
Oscillation (AMO) index is added to the set of explanatory variables,
the fraction of accounted for temperature variance increases to 94%. The
anthropogenic effects account for about two thirds of the post-1975
global warming with one third being due to the positive phase of the
AMO. In comparison, the Coupled Models Intercomparison Project Phase 5
(CMIP5) ensemble mean accounts for 87% of the observed global mean
temperature variance. Some of the CMIP5 models mimic the AMO-like
oscillation by a strong aerosol effect. These models simulate the
twentieth century AMO-like cycle with correct timing in each individual
simulation. An inverse structural analysis suggests that these models
generally overestimate the greenhouse gases-induced warming, which is
then compensated by an overestimate of anthropogenic aerosol cooling".

Note
the sentence "The anthropogenic effects account for about two thirds of
the post-1975 global warming with one third being due to the positive
phase of the AMO"

And in the Discussion section of the article we
read: "Our analysis suggests that about two thirds of the late
twentieth century warming has been due to anthropogenic influences"

So
there you have it: Global warming has been proven to be
mainly caused by "anthropogenic effects". When a very
sophisticated and careful piece of research comes to that conclusion is
there any room left for climate skepticism?

I am afraid there is a
very large room left. The study is correlational: "A
multiple linear regression analysis" and you can't infer causation from
correlation. Yet the sentences I have singled out appear to do
exactly that. An unsophisticated reader would conclude that
anthropogenic global warming has now been proven.

Now I feel
confident that Chylek and his friends are reasonable people who would be
ready to admit to what I have just charged and would say that they were
just expresssing themselves in a shorthand way and that they knew from
the beginning that the coincidence of temperature rise and CO2 rise in
the late 20th century was no proof of anything -- particularly in
the light of the later divergence of those two variables. But the
global warming debate now involves so many people outside the scientific
community that I will still charge them with carelessness in the
matter. When unsophisticated people are likely to read your words,
you have a duty to make them as clear as you can.

Sen.
James Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, said Wednesday at a hearing on the Defense Department's
Fiscal Year 2015 budget that President Barack Obama has wasted $120
billion on global warming over the past five years - money that would be
better spent on the military.

"I've been working on this for
quite some time ... In the last five years, between 2009 and 2014, the
president has spent $120 billion on the environmental agenda, mostly
global warming, climate and that type of thing," said Inhofe. "And in
that respect, if you'll just take the amount that was not authorized by
Congress -- and I'm talking about the environmental agenda, you could
actually buy 1,400 F-35s."

The Navy plans to order 33 fewer F-35s
than originally planned over the five years beginning fiscal year 2015,
because of budgetary pressures, and the Air Force is deferring orders
for four F-35 models in FY2015, Reuters reported. Defense Secretary
Chuck Hagel said the total number of F-35s might be scaled back even
further if automatic budget cuts set to resume in FY 2016 are not
revoked.

The FY 2015 budget cuts would reduce the military to
pre-World War II levels - "the first budget to fully reflect the
transition [the Defense Department] is making after 13 years of war,"
Hagel said, warning that the military "will assume additional risk in
certain areas," including training and maintenance. Should major
conflicts break out in several places at once, the military would be
stretched thin, he added.

"And I think people need to understand
that there's a price we're paying for all these agendas that have been
rejected by Congress," Inhofe said. He told Family Research Council
President Tony Perkins on the weekend edition of "Washington Watch" that
Obama has "denigrated our military to the point where we're not the
force we were at one time."

Democrats
control the Senate, but instead of bringing up a Democrat-sponsored
climate-change bill, a few dozen of them pulled an all-nigher on the
Senate floor to draw attention to the issue.

It's a clear
indication that Democrats don't have the votes -- or the public support
-- to pass their own climate-change legislation. And they blame the lack
of bipartisanship on billionaire Republican donors and "all that dark
money," as one Democrat described it.

When it was his turn to
speak, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) once again mentioned
the Koch brothers by name, blaming them for their alleged corrupting
influence on politics.

"It's time to stop acting like those who
ignore this (climate) crisis - the oil baron Koch brothers and their
allies in Congress - have a valid point of view," Reid said.

This was Reid's third recent broadside at the conservative "oil barons."

Sen.
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told the empty Senate chamber early Tuesday
morning that there used to be bipartisanship on climate change --
"until Citizens United got decided by the Supreme Court. Until all that
big money came in, until all that dark money came in. Until people on
the Republican side who were willing to speak up about climate change
were punished and threatened so badly that they could no longer do it."

Whitehouse
said the "Citizens United effect" hasn't trickled down to governors and
counties as much as it has to the Washington establishment: "Here, it's
different," he said. "We don't have to live in that same real world. We
live in a more political world. And so people can say things that are
frankly, irresponsible, untrue -- and they can get away with it longer.
And the intimidation factor of that big money is worse here."

Where
is the bipartisanship? Whitehouse asked around 4:30 Tuesday morning.
"Well, it will be back. It will be back here. It's inevitable."

Speaking
to Ronan Farrow on MSNBC on Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)
another climate-change believer, said, "My great fear is that both
economically and politically, this nation is moving toward an oligarchic
form of society where a handful of billionaires are going to control
the political life and the economic life of this nation.

"And
what this supreme court case is about, and what Citizens United is all
about, is saying to large corporations and billionaires, 'You can spend
as much money as you want on the political process. You can buy and sell
candidates. You can do everything you want to create a right-wing
agenda which will benefit the wealthy at the expense of everybody else.'

"This
is not what American democracy is supposed to be about," Sanders said.
He said this is why he believes in public funding of elections, and it's
also why Democrats are "working hard to try to overturn Citizens
United."

Sanders also singled out the Koch brothers, along with
Sheldon Adelson, describing them as billionaires whose wealth is
increasing: "They can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns
which, by and large, will benefit Republicans.

"Are there some
billionaires who help Democrats? Sanders asked. "Yes, there are. But the
vast majority of the money (is) going to go to right-wing extremist
candidates."

Sanders said the American people "have no idea" how
much time members of Congress -- both Republicans and Democrats -- spend
raising money. And "the money is with wealthy people," who set the
agenda for the politicians.

"So, if you're going to the wealthy
to ask for campaign contributions, your political views are going to be
shaped by that reality. You're not worried about the high unemployment
in this country. You're not worried about the need to create millions of
jobs. You're not worried about the fact that we have more people living
in poverty than in any time in our history. What you're worried about
are the needs of the wealthy and the powerful."

Sanders noted
that he and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) have sponsored "probably the
most comprehensive climate change legislation ever introduced, which,
among other things, calls for a tax on carbon, which would invest very,
very substantially in energy efficiency and sustainable energy."

"But
I think what we're trying to do now, in terms of tonight, is to make
the American people aware that the debate about climate change really is
over. That the scientific community is virtually unanimous in agreeing
that climate change is real, that it is caused by human activity, that
it is already causing devastating problems in the United States and
around the world.

"So, what we're doing now is speaking to the
American people, and saying, 'You have got to be involved in this
process. Because if you aren't, the planet that we're going to leave to
our kids and our grandchildren will be significantly less habitable than
the one we have today, and will cause enormous problems at great
expense in terms of trying to address.' So, we got to act now, and
that's what we're trying to do."

In
many ways, both Vladimir Putin's Russia and the modern green movement
are offshoots of the collapse of the Soviet empire. They remain united
against the old Soviet enemy: free markets and free minds.

The
global warming policy labyrinth offered obvious potential to a KGB
politician who had thrived in a climate of devious hypocrisy

Few
environmentalists would regard themselves as allies of Vladimir Putin.
Indeed, in their stout opposition to petroleum, which the Russian
president is using both as a piggy bank and a weapon for expanding his
power, it might appear that they are opponents. Such a view is
superficial.

In many ways, both Mr. Putin's Russia and the modern
green movement are offshoots of the collapse of the Soviet empire. They
remain united against the old Soviet enemy: free markets and free
minds.

Petroleum has been the energy driver of economic growth
and prosperity for much of the past century, but it has also fuelled
tyranny: "the resource curse." Oil and gas were indeed a curse for the
Soviet people for seventy years. However, the dependence of the Soviet
state on petroleum revenues during a time of sagging prices in the 1980s
also helped push it into collapse.

Many pundits naively believed
that the collapse would lead to the spontaneous outbreak of democratic
capitalism. The prospect of democracy was welcomed. Capitalism not so
much. Not only was capitalism the demonized fiction on which Communism
had been based, its alleged flaws were the rationalization for the vast
bulk of interventionist policies that kept Western politicians in
business. The latest and greatest, which was just beginning to rear its
head as Communism collapsed, was man-made global warming.

The
notion that capitalism might somehow have "triumphed" with the break up
of the Soviet Empire was in any case as outrageous for Western
left-liberal elites as the collapse of that empire was tragic for
Vladimir Putin.

Mr. Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin ten years after
the collapse, in 2000, and brought back the resource curse. He did so
by exploiting the strategic error of "shock therapy," which had enabled
former Soviet insiders known as "oligarchs" to grab petroleum and other
resources assets. Mr. Putin used public resentment against the oligarchs
to seize back control of Russian petroleum, which would fund his twin
ambitions: to make Russia feared once more on the international arena,
and to seize back choice parts of the old Soviet empire, an objective
which he is currently pursuing in the Ukraine.

The timing of Mr.
Putin's return to de facto control of oil was impeccable, as both the
explosive growth of China and loose money policies in the West led to a
surge in oil prices in the early years of the twenty first century. He
was also helped by another less obvious ally: the environmental movement
and its demonization of the carbon dioxide emissions that had driven
capitalist global prosperity.

It might appear that a movement
that wanted to end the age of petroleum would be antithetical to a man
whose aspirations were based on petroleum. However, the global warming
policy labyrinth offered obvious potential to a former Soviet secret
policeman who had thrived in a climate of devious hypocrisy.

From
the perspective of those behind "official" climate science and the
Kyoto process, Russia's industrial collapse in the 1990s had been not so
much a disaster as a model. They even offered rewards to Russia in the
shape of "credits" for the reduction in greenhouse gases that went with
post Soviet turmoil.

In the Alice-in-wonderland climate policy
world, Russia would be able to sell its non-emissions to Western
producers, who would be forced to buy them as a penalty for creating
wealth under a relatively free market.

The European Union dangled
membership of the World Trade Organization as another incentive to Mr.
Putin to sign onto Kyoto, which Mr. Putin duly did, even though one of
his most insightful former advisors, Andrei Illarionov, called it a
"death pact." However, just as millionaire climate evangelists such as
Al Gore, Neil Young and Tom Steyer think that lifestyle restraint is for
others, so Mr. Putin no doubt grasped that Kyoto commitment was only
for suckers (such as Canada).

He realized that the environmental
movement's attempts to end the age of petroleum would impact only his
Western rivals, first in their campaigns against private oil companies,
and second in the disastrous impact of green policies in weakening
Europe.

Europe has been sideswiped a couple of times since 2006
as Mr. Putin has used natural gas - of which Russia is still a
significant supplier - as a weapon in the Ukraine.

The EU's
initial response was to claim that what was needed was more state energy
monopolization a la Gazprom, Mr. Putin's energy vanguard, and more
alternative energy. After all, the main problem wasn't that the EU was
importing energy from an aspiring tyrant, it was that it was emitting
too much CO2.

When Russian assumed the presidency of the G8 in
2006, Mr. Putin called for a global energy strategy that was
"environmentally sustainable" and castigated "energy egotism," by which
he presumably meant free markets.

Fast forward seven years and
Europe's alternative energy policy is in a shambles. The EU would be
even more vulnerable but for a typically unanticipated example of free
market ingenuity: hydraulic fracturing and the boom in shale gas.

Natural
gas is much less emissions intensive than oil and coal, so you would
think that any movement concerned to reduce emissions would welcome this
development. But guess what: Greens are everywhere resolutely opposed
to fracking, and nowhere more than in Europe.

One does not doubt
that the majority of young people who chain themselves to shale gas
facilities are "well-motivated" and "environmentally-concerned," but,
like their peace march colleagues half a century ago, they are
ultimately dupes for an authoritarian agenda, be it that of the high
priests of Gaia, or Vladimir Putin.

Wits
University scientists have debunked two big myths around climate change
by proving firstly, that despite predictions, tropical storms are not
increasing in number. However, they are shifting, and South Africa could
be at increased risk of being directly impacted by tropical cyclones
within the next 40 years. Secondly, while global warming is causing
frost to be less severe, late season frost is not receding as quickly as
flowering is advancing, resulting in increased frost risk which will
likely begin to threaten food security.

FavioAccording to
Jennifer Fitchett, a PhD student in the Wits School of Geography,
Archaeology and Environmental Studies (GAES), there has been an
assumption that increasing sea surface temperatures caused by global
warming is causing an increase in the number of tropical cyclones.

But
looking at data for the south-west Indian Ocean over the past 161
years, Fitchett and co-author Professor Stefan Grab, also from GAES,
confirmed the results of previous studies which have found that there
has been no increase in the number of tropical cyclones and that much of
the perceived change in numbers is a result of improved storm detection
methods. "From 1940, there was a huge increase in observations because
of aerial reconnaissance and satellite imagery," she says.

The
big surprise came when Fitchett and Grab looked at where storms have
been happening. As the oceans have warmed and the minimum sea surface
temperature necessary for a cyclone to occur (26.5 degrees Celsius) has
been moving further south, storms in the south-west Indian Ocean have
been moving further south too.

Most cyclones hit Madagascar and
do not continue to Mozambique, and those which hit Mozambique develop to
the North of Madagascar, but in the past 66 years there have been seven
storms which have developed south of Madagascar and hit Mozambique
head-on. More notable is that four of them occurred in the past 20
years. "This definitely looks like the start of a trend," says Fitchett.

South
Africa is already feeling the effects of this shift. The cyclones that
hit southern Mozambique cause heavy rain and flooding in Limpopo. But
according to Fitchett, the trend becomes even more concerning when one
considers that the 26.5 degrees Celsius temperature line (isotherm) has
been moving south at a rate of 0.6 degrees latitude per decade since
1850. "At current rates we could see frequent serious damage in South
Africa by 2050," she says.

"This is not what we expected from
climate change. We thought tropical cyclones might increase in number
but we never expected them to move."

In a separate
study, Fitchett and co-authors looked at different types of citrus -
oranges, lemons and tangerines - in two cities in Iran, where the
existence of heritage gardens meant data were easily available. They
found that while global warming is causing the fruit trees to flower as
much as a month earlier than 50 years ago, which is a very rapid shift,
changes in late season frost are not happening nearly as quickly.

Before
1988 there were zero to three days between peak flowering and the last
day of frost in Kerman, Iran; since then, the number has increased to
zero to 15.

Jennifer Fitchett"The layman's assumption is that as
temperatures get warmer, there will be less frost. But although the
severity of the frost has decreased, the last day of frost hasn't been
receding as quickly as the advances in flowering. The result is that
frost events are increasingly taking place during flowering and damaging
the flowers. No flowers equals no fruit," says Fitchett.

According
to the study, at current rates, it will take only 70 years before it
becomes a certainty that frost will occur during peak flowering in
Kerman. Already, since 1988, frost has occurred during peak flowering in
41% of the years.

"Iran is a top citrus producer but they don't
export and we don't yet have data on whether there has been an impact on
their citrus yields. We think that if there hasn't already been a huge
impact, there soon will be," says Fitchett.

South Africa also
produces a lot of citrus - for local and international consumption - and
the country has been experiencing similar climate warming to Iran.
South African farmers are not yet recording the flowering dates of their
crops which makes it hard to repeat the study locally, but according to
Fitchett, the threat is of concern.

Fitchett and Grab's paper
titled: A 66-year tropical cyclone record for south-east Africa:
temporal trends in a global context was published in the International
Journal of Climatology in February 2014 and evolved out of work Fitchett
undertook during her honours degree at Wits.

GREENS
senator Scott Ludlam debased himself and lowered the tone of his
campaign for re-election by accusing Tony Abbott of being homophobic and
racist in a Senate speech, community leaders said yesterday.

The
speech, which was delivered to an empty chamber on Monday but went
viral on social media and has received almost half-a-million views on
YouTube, accused the Prime Minister of “waving homophobia” and “racist
exploitation” of the electorate.

Former Labor national president
and chair of the Prime Minister’s indigenous advisory council Warren
Mundine said Senator Ludlam was “full of crap”.

“Look, I know
them both and they’re both pretty good guys but Scott is ramping up his
election campaign and he’s playing politics,” he said.

“It’s a
load of rubbish, he’s way off the board.” Mr Abbott’s personal friend
Cate McGregor, who transitioned from male to female while serving in the
army, defended him against claims of transphobia on social media this
week.

“He has shamed many progressives, including lawyers, in his
acceptance of me as well,” she wrote. “He is my friend. And a
good one.”

Mr Abbott’s sister Christine Forster, a Sydney City
councillor and in a committed same-sex relationship, said her brother
showed his real colours by the friends he kept across the sexuality
spectrum, including the openly gay journalist — and a former mentor of
Mr Abbott — Christopher Pearson, who wrote a column for The Weekend
Australian.

“He was very good friends with Christopher Pearson, and his passing was a terrible loss for Tony,” she said.

“You know, it’s almost tiring having to say Tony is not a homophobe, he’s not racist.

“Scott is a Green and in that speech he was talking to Greens and it was a cheap way to get a headline.”

Australian
Marriage Equality national director Rodney Croome said it was unhelpful
to charge Mr Abbott with homophobia when he had clear but changing
views on the issue of same-sex marriage.

“Many people who oppose
marriage equality do so, not out of homophobia, but out of sincerely
held religious beliefs or views about the nature of marriage, and I
think the Prime Minister falls into this latter category,” Mr Croome
added.

“While I’d like Mr Abbott to support marriage equality I also acknowledge that he has already come a long way on the issue.”

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

11 March, 2014

Forget his fearsome reputation - Genghis Khan rose to power thanks to a period of wet and warm WEATHER

During
what climate historians know as the Medieval Warm Period. Against
all evidence, Warmists doggedly insist that the MWP occurred only
in North Atlantic regions. Mongolia is in the North
Atlantic area? It is in fact on the opposite side of the Eurasian
continent

He was one of the most feared warriors
in history, waging bloody war across Asia and Europe. But Genghis
Khan’s 13th-century rampage may have never happened had it not been for
a spell of good weather.

The leader of the Mongol armies created a vast empire that eventually stretched across China, India, Russia and Eastern Europe.

Historians
used to think his armies of nomadic horsemen were fleeing the bleak,
cold and dry Mongolian plains for warmer regions. But now
scientists have discovered that the rise of the Mongol Empire coincided
with a 14-year spell of weather that was the warmest and wettest for
1,000 years.

The academics, from Columbia University in New York,
discovered the weather anomaly by studying the rings of ancient
trees. They think the conditions created those needed for a boost
in lush growth of grass, which would have fuelled the soldiers' horses
and fattened their livestock.

The good weather lasted from 1211 to 1225 - the exact period when Genghis Khan and his armies rose to prominence.

Amy
Hessl, co-author of the study published in the journal Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, said: ‘The transition from extreme
drought to extreme moisture right then strongly suggests that climate
played a role in human events.

‘It wasn’t the only thing, but it
must have created the ideal conditions for a charismatic leader to
emerge out of the chaos, develop an army and concentrate power.

‘Where
it’s arid, unusual moisture creates unusual plant productivity, and
that translates into horsepower. Genghis was literally able to ride that
wave.’

Before Khan rose to power the Mongol tribes had been
racked by disarray and internal warfare. In the early 1200s he
united the tribes, creating a military state that invaded its neighbours
and expanded, soon ruling most of what would become modern Korea,
China, Russia, eastern Europe, southeast Asia, Persia and India.

Khan made himself master of half the known world, and inspired mankind with a fear that lasted for generations.

He
was a prolific lover, fathering hundreds of children across his
territories. Some scientists think he has 16 million male descendants
alive today.

In all, Genghis conquered almost four times the
lands of Alexander the Great. He is still revered in Mongolia and in
parts of China.

The empire eventually fragmented, but the
Mongols’ vast geographic reach and their inventions survived.
Their ideas included an international postal system, organized
agriculture research and a civil service based on merit.

Neil
Pederson, who co-wrote the paper, said: ‘Before fossil fuels, grass and
ingenuity were the fuels for the Mongols and the cultures around them.

Other
historical events that studies say were affected by climate include the
disappearance of the Maya, the expansion and fall of Roman imperial
power and the 13th-century collapse of south east Asia's Angkor
civilisation.

The
Energiewende or “energy transition” in Germany is a cautionary tale in
many respects not least the unintended consequences of policy.

The
German energy policy has been guided by three European directives. A
target for reduction in carbon emissions, an effort to increase energy
efficiency and critically a target for renewables in the energy mix. The
desire to cut carbon emissions may be laudable if somewhat ineffective
if China and India continue to increase their output of CO2, and a push
to reduce energy efficiency seems sensible. However it is the third of
the EU directives that has possibly led to most harm.

A target
for renewables in the energy mix has forced EU governments to pick and
support the only technologies that are scalable within the present
timescale, regardless of cost. So Germany has offered large subsidies
for solar and wind which has led to a huge increase in German energy
prices but then had to offer subsidies to German heavy industry to
shield them from the increasing costs of power. But then these energy
subsidies to industry have in turn been challenged by the EU.

Furthermore,
the German government’s stance on energy includes decommissioning its
nuclear power stations. This combined with an increase in renewables
which by their nature provide intermittent power and which have priority
access to feed the grid has destabilized the energy market. Gas plants
previously providing base load power are now only used to balance
renewables making them uncompetitive and leading to the bizarre
consequence that Germany is now building new lignite coal power stations
to provide this back up generation capacity for its large renewable
sector.

So the end result is that due to the skewed policy
response caused by EU energy policy, Germany is locked into very heavily
subsidized solar and wind production causing energy prices to rise
whilst at the same time building more coal fired capacity to back up the
intermittency of its large renewable sector which negates the central
plank of EU policy to reduce carbon emissions. And the increasing price
of energy is seeing large German energy users turning to the US to
invest in new plant and further carbon leakage to the developing nations

All
this is in stark contrast with the US. Cheap and abundant shale
gas has pushed much of the dirtier coal energy production out of
the energy mix, so without heavy market intervention the US has
dramatically reduced its CO2 emissions whilst slashing its energy costs.
And whilst once the energy debate in the EU was in part characterized
by showing the world how policy directives could lead the way in
effective CO2 reduction the result seems to prove the exact opposite.

If
the history of the Obama administration is any indication, one of the
most efficient ways for the federal government to waste money is to
“invest” it in green energy projects. Projects that are doomed to fail
because they are nowhere near being economically viable.

In fact,
we could argue that the green energy industry itself just isn’t
sustainable, which makes these kinds of government-subsidized
“investments” a very bad deal for taxpayers.

It would be one
thing if only the money of millionaires and billionaires were at high
risk of being lost, but when ventures like these are entirely dependent
upon government subsidies to even exist in the first place, that’s a
very good indication that there are a lot of better and smarter things
that could be done with the taxpayers’ money. Especially when there is
no hope of the green energy projects ever living up to their promises.

Unfortunately,
because the green energy industry is so dependent upon the government’s
subsidized support for its existence, rather than developing
economically viable technologies and businesses, it spends a lot of its
limited resources on keeping the stream of government subsidies that
feed it going. Their latest gambit has reached all the way into the
White House, as President Obama’s latest budget proposal is actually
proposing disadvantaging their profitable competitors while making their
own subsidized support permanent:

Yesterday, President Obama
unveiled his proposed national budget for fiscal year 2015, and it
includes a smorgasbord of efforts on climate issues.

“We know
that future generations will continue to deal with the effects of a
warming planet,” the President said yesterday in a speech introducing
the budget.

The $3.9 trillion document allocates about $1
trillion for discretionary spending across both defense and non-defense,
with the rest going to mandatory programs like Social Security and
Medicare. Within that $1 trillion, Obama carves out numerous programs to
push forward the climate action plan he announced last year….

This
includes a permanent extension of the production tax credit for wind — a
cost of $19.2 billion over ten years — which expired at the end of
2013….

The budget would axe about $4 billion in tax breaks that
are currently available to the oil and natural gas industries, and
another $3.9 billion in tax preferences for coal.

It must be
really nice to have a “friend” in the White House who is willing to help
you stack the deck in your favor, no matter the cost to taxpayers.
Bloomberg Businessweek explains how important it is for the wind energy
lobby to get that tax credit made permanent:

In Texas, the wind
tends to blow the hardest in the middle of the night. That’s also when
most people are asleep and electricity prices drop, which would be a big
problem for the companies that own the state’s 7,690 wind turbines if
not for a 20-year-old federal subsidy that effectively pays them a flat
rate for making clean energy no matter what time it is. Wind farms,
whether privately owned or part of a public utility, receive a $23 tax
credit for every megawatt-hour of electricity they generate. (A
megawatt-hour is enough juice to power about 1,000 homes for one hour.)
This credit, which was worth about $2 billion for all U.S. wind projects
in 2013, has helped lower the price of electricity in parts of the
country where wind power is prevalent, since wind producers can charge
less and still turn a profit. In Texas, the biggest wind-producing state
in the U.S., wind farms have occasionally sold electricity for less
than zero—that is, they’ve paid to provide power to the grid to undercut
the state’s nuclear or coal energy providers.

This sweetheart
deal looks to be on its way out, in part because it succeeded in what it
set out to do. Over the past five years, wind has accounted for 36
percent of all new electricity generation installed in the U.S., second
only to new natural gas installations. Wind now supplies more than 4
percent of the country’s electricity. At about 60,000 megawatts, there’s
enough wind energy capacity to power 15.2 million U.S. homes, a more
than twentyfold increase since 2000. It’s still tiny compared to fossil
fuel: Combined, coal and natural gas supply roughly two-thirds of U.S.
electricity. But wind produces about six times more electricity than
solar. That’s led Congress to take steps to do away with tax incentives
first established in 1992 to help the fledgling industry take root. In
December lawmakers allowed the credit to expire.

That the green
energy lobby is now working to make the wind energy tax credit a
permanent burden upon U.S. taxpayers, even as the industry supporters
claim the industry’s “success”, really means that the entire industry’s
business model is fatally flawed. In calling to make the tax credit
permanent at their behest, President Obama is really communicating on
their behalf that the wind energy industry will never be able to sustain
itself without it.

A smart investor would recognize these things
and cut their losses so they could move on to greener opportunities.
Allowing the wind energy industry’s tax credit to permanently expire
rather than be made a permanent burden for American taxpayers would make
that possible.

Democrats
have decided to lean-in, not back-away, from so-called clean energy.
Despite the embarrassing history of government-funded green-energy
failures, “wealthy environmentalists are pushing Democrats to take
bolder positions on climate change”—and global warming, as an issue,
provides the impetus for more green-energy spending.

The Boston
Globe reported on a recent “summit between Washington’s liberal elite
and San Francisco’s climate intelligensia” that included “Senate
majority leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, six other senators, and …
Al Gore.” The Globe points to new efforts by Democrats to “make global
warming a central issue during the midterms.”

Reid has, according
to the Globe, “pledged to allot time to anyone who wants to discuss
climate change at party lunches or on the Senate floor.” He needs to
keep the ruse alive because he is connected to more than $3 billion in
Energy Department green-energy deals that helped him get reelected in
2010—behavior that has earned him the moniker: “one of America’s most
corrupt politicians.”

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), along with
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), has planned an all-night talkathon on
the subject that will take place on Monday, March 10—about which Boxer
said: “So many Senators coming together for an all-night session shows
our commitment to wake up Congress to the dangers of climate change.”
According to a press release from the Senate Committee on Environment
and Public Works, 28 Senators will be participating—slightly more than
one quarter of the Senate.

Apparently they don’t want to miss out
on the $100 million in campaign cash the “wealthy environmentalists”
have committed to cooperative candidates—while also “threatening to
withhold money from candidates in swing states who support the Keystone
oil pipeline.”

The Globe quotes Wade Randlett, a renewable energy
entrepreneur who co-hosted the San Francisco fundraiser, as saying:
“What was really energizing is everyone understood clean energy would be
at the forefront of the Senate agenda. It wasn’t back-away; it was
clearly lean-in.”

So, who are these “wealthy environmentalists,”
who are driving the agenda and making powerful U.S. Senators jump like
an organ grinder’s monkey to do their bidding? The answer is found in
Christine Lakatos’ newest report for the Green Corruption Files: The
dark, driving force behind the president’s massive green-energy scheme.

Since
2012, Lakatos and I have partnered to expose Obama’s green-energy
crony-corruption scandal. She does the research and writes the thorough
exposé on the chosen topic and, based on her work, I write the overview
report and link to the Green Corruption File for those who want the full
story. Our collaborative efforts have been cited by prominent
commentators, such as Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin, and referenced
in many news stories.

Lakatos focuses on left-wing think tank,
Center for American Progress (CAP) founded by John Podesta—who is now
serving as White House counselor specializing in climate change issues.
The Huffington Post (HP) says this about CAP and Podesta: “John Podesta
probably is and has been the most important opinion leader for
progressives in America in the last decade, certainly during the term of
the Obama Administration, through his leadership of the Center for
American Progress (CAP).” HP points out: CAP has “been a vocal voice for
this president’s policies in the media and on the Hill. But their area
of highest visibility is advocacy for a clean energy economy where John
Podesta has personally led the effort.”

Podesta is the organ
grinder from within the White House and progressive political platforms.
Tom Steyer is now doing the same from outside Washington—leading “San
Francisco’s climate intelligensia.”

Lakatos chronicles many key
players with readily recognizable names who have connections to the
Obama White House, CAP, and green energy projects. They include Lawrence
Summers, Carol Browner, Steve Spinner, and Van Jones—as well as many
others who have been heavily involved but have maintained a lower
profile and corporate donors that are tied to tens of billions of green
energy funds. However, in light of his recent political-influence
reveal, Tom Steyer—CAP Board Member and donor, Obama bundler, and host
of the recent “summit” (held on his 1800-acre ranch, with views of the
Golden Gate Bridge)—is worthy of special attention.

Lakatos
states: “Like most prominent Obama fundraisers, Steyer has enjoyed
relatively easy access to the White House, and as of the summer of 2012,
it was reported that he had met with senior White House officials in
the West Wing on at least four occasions. Steyer was even handpicked to
make a cameo appearance at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.”

Steyer
founded and was the Senior Managing Member of Farallon Capital
Management—until late 2012 when the firm’s partners bought out his
“profit share.” His net worth is estimated to be $1.55 billion—some of
which is reported to have been made through millions of dollars worth of
shares his firm invested in big oil companies such as BP and pipeline
company Kinder Morgan. Fox News reports: “He continues to have
significant investments with Farallon, according to a spokesman, Steyer
has directed the fund to ‘green’ his portfolio and divest him of all
positions in oil and coal—including Kinder Morgan.”

Regarding his
recent interest in California’s blooming green-technology industry, the
New York Times (NYT) quoted Steyer as saying: “really what we’re
fighting is self-interested dirty-energy companies.”

Having made
billions through “dirty-energy companies,” Farallon Capital Management
has been greening its portfolio. The NYT cites Steyer, when he was still
with Farallon, as “the main financial backer of Greener Capital [now
EFW Capital], a venture firm that invests in renewable energy start
ups.” A 2012 Washington Free Beacon report points out some of Farallon’s
other green-energy investments:

Farallon owns nearly $14 million
worth of shares of Westport Innovations, the self-described “global
leader in natural gas engines.” The Westport Carbon Project (WCP),
according to its website, “was established to monetize the carbon
emission reductions associated with the Westport HD engine, the Cummins
Westport ISL G and other natural gas engines developed with our OEM
partners. The WCP enables customers to earn annual carbon rebate cheques
for the natural gas vehicles in their fleet as of January 1, 2010.”

Farallon
also owns more than $8 million worth of shares of Fuel Systems
Solutions, which according to its website “designs, manufactures and
supplies proven, cost-effective alternative fuel components and systems
for transportation and industrial applications. Its gaseous fuel
technology for propane (LPG) and natural gas (CNG) generates savings,
reduces emissions, and promotes energy independence.”

While a
2011 Forbes profile on Steyer quotes him as saying: “I am a true
believer that we have to change the way we generate and consume energy
in the United States,” it would also be easy to view his combined
investment and politicking efforts as “self-interested,” as he does
stand to profit from the polices he’s promoting.

Senator David
Vitter (R-LA), in the Fox News story accuses Steyer of having financial
interest in the death of a pipeline he opposes on environmental grounds.
Vitter says: “I think it’s hypocrisy, quite frankly. Who knows when
he's going to divest of these investments ... maybe in a few months when
his helping kill Keystone will boost them up to top value. ... Who
knows?”

According to Steyer spokesman Chris LeHane, “This
divestment has been taking place consistent with the applicable legal
requirements.”

Steyer calling traditional energy companies
“self-interested” is like the presumed morally superior pot calling the
proven economically superior kettle black. Perhaps he really is a “true
believer.” If so, he should remove himself from any form of financial
gain he can reap from his political activism and donations. But maybe,
like I do, those self-interested oil companies truly believe that
developing our own resources to provide all Americans with energy that
is efficient, effective and economical is in America’s best interest.

The
2014 elections give Americans the opportunity to decide whether they
side with the 28 Democrat Senators at Monday night’s sleepover who are
dancing at the behest of the organ grinders—or if we want to learn from
the mistakes of their failed green-energy projects only profiting the
wealthy while robbing taxpayers, raising electricity rates and hurting
the poor.

On
October 20, 1948, the Soviet government announced the world'ss first
state- centered program to reverse human-induced climate change, a
grandiose plan to construct 5.7 million hectares of forest in the
Russian south. However, the plan collapsed upon Stalin's death in 1953
because of a fundamental contradiction at the plan's heart. At first,
the Stalin Plan advanced a basically conservative vision of restoring
the steppes to an imagined prehistoric state, but soon a group of
radical scientists advancing untested silvicultural theories managed to
take control. The resulting struggle between the old approach and the
new brought about the plan's collapse.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY
DICTATORS liked trees. Although the environmental record of
authoritarianism offers a dismal list of failures, including the nuclear
accidents at Chernobyl and Chelyabinsk-65, the fouled air of Beijing
and Shanghai, the vanished fisheries of the Aral and Caspian Seas, and
the acidified industrial wastelands of Bitterfeld and Katowice,
afforestation projects represent a notable exception. Indeed,
afforestation on a massive scale was the environmental panacea of choice
for dictators in the twentieth century.

The Nazis and their Reichforstmeister,
Hermann Göring, in addition to making the conservation-spirited
Dauerwald the preferred forestry method for the German Reich, initiated a
sweeping National Afforestation Program in 1934, focused on creating
ecologically sound mixed forests, a program which succeeded in
increasing the overall forest cover of Germany despite aggressive
industrialization and the rigors of war.

Benito Mussolini
created a “ National Forest Militia", a black-shirted paramilitary group
under the direction of the General Command of the Voluntary Militia for
Natural Security, to assist in “ technical work, reforestation ... and
propaganda in the field of silviculture. ”

Mao Zedong devoted
little attention to forestry matters, and his Great Leap Forward (1958 –
1960) and Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1969) resulted in widespread
forest destruction, but his followers have taken afforestation very
seriously, embarking in 1978 on the construction of a “ Great Green Wall
” more than four thousand kilometers in length, with the aim of
doubling the forest cover of the Chinese north.

But older and
bolder than any of these was the Soviet effort, which began in the early
1920s and reached its zenith in 1948 with the “Great Stalin Plan for
the Transformation of Nature”, the world's first state-directed effort
to reverse human-induced climate change.

The Stalin Plan foresaw
the creation of nearly six million hectares of new forest — an area
greater than that of all the forests of Western Europe — in the form of
windbreaks along the rivers of the Russian south and the perimeters of
the collective farms. According to Soviet claims, these new forests
would halt desiccating Central Asian winds, cool and dampen the climate
of southern Russia, and eliminate the periodic droughts that had
afflicted the steppe for decades. But despite an enormous propaganda
blitz, including a patriotic oratorio composed by Dmitrii Shostakovich,
and the allocation of huge sums of money, the plan was abandoned after
fewer than five years,

Perhaps
the most frustrating aspect of the science of climate change is the
lack of any real substance in attempts to justify the hypothesis ~Professor Stewart Franks

ICSC
Chief Science Advisor Professor Bob Carter discusses the NIPCC
report: "Any human global climate signal is so small as to be
embedded within the background variability of the natural climate
system"

"In
today's show we are joined by Professor Bob Carter for the entire
second hour to discuss the findings contained in the latest NIPCC
report.

"The NIPCC ("Nongovernmental International Panel on
Climate Change") is an international panel of nongovernment
scientists and scholars who have come together to understand the causes
and consequences of climate change from a sceptical viewpoint, looking
at information which is routinely ignored by the official U.N. body, the
IPCC.

"The NIPCC was formed in response to the IPCC's Fourth
Assessment Report, released in 2007 with the aim of providing an
independent, second opinion on the IPCC's findings. The first full
report of the NIPCC was published in 2009. Another report followed in
2011, and the latest report was published in 2013.

"The 2013
NIPCC report contains an Executive Summary and a Summary for Policy
Makers which present the findings in an approachable way for general
readers. "From the Summary For Policy Makers:

"NIPCC’s
conclusion, drawn from its extensive review of the scientific evidence,
is that any human global climate signal is so small as to be embedded
within the background variability of the natural climate system and is
not dangerous. At the same time, global temperature change is occurring,
as it always naturally does. A phase of temperature stasis or cooling
has succeeded the mild twentieth century warming. It is certain that
similar natural climate changes will continue to occur.

"In the
show today, Professor Carter goes through some of the key findings in
the latest report and addresses some popular misconceptions about polar
ice and climate variability over the past ten thousand years."

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

Scientists
associated with the UN's IPCC predicted that the huge
consumer/industrial emissions of the modern era would cause not only
"unprecedented" global warming but also dangerous "runaway" warming,
which would then produce "tipping point" climate change.

The
climate science consensus today is that these speculative climate
forecasts, based on flawed computer models, did not happen and expert
analysis of the gold-standard of temperature datasets (the UK's global
HadCRUT4) confirms it.

As this adjacent chart reveals, modern
warming increases over the last 60 years don't even match the warming
increases of the prior 60-year period, when earlier human emissions were
just a fraction of contemporary amounts. (The vast difference of
increases for atmospheric CO2 levels, between the two 60-year periods,
is depicted on the chart - an 18ppm increase for the earlier period
versus an 82ppm increase for the modern 60-year period.)

The
climate science fact that huge modern CO2 emissions did not generate the
expected runaway warming over the long-term, nor even over the
shorter-term, now has the establishment science journals questioning the
obvious - how was the IPCC so wrong?

And this empirical
evidence refutation of conventional climate science has become so
glaring, that even the traditional mainstream press is finally taking
notice that something is truly amiss regarding the IPCC's climate
science orthodoxy.

Welsh
researchers have found changes in the Sun's activity over the last
thousand years may have led to marked natural climate change.

Scientists
at Cardiff University studied the seabed to determine how the
temperature of the North Atlantic had altered, with the results showing
that changes in the sun's activity can have a considerable impact on the
dynamics of the ocean, with potential effects on regional climate.

They say the study will allow them to better predict regional climate change.

Professor Ian Hall, from the University says this could lead to colder winters.

The
nation seems to be passing through a period in which too many U.S.
Senators have been elected without so much as a high school level
understanding of what drives the Earth’s climate and it isn’t the 0.038%
of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.

On Monday, March 10,
some twenty of them will stay up overnight on the Senate floor,
according to The Hill, “to bring attention to the impacts of climate
change.” You don’t get more idiotic than that. Climate, measured
in decades and centuries, is always in a state of change. Meanwhile, the
weather anywhere in the nation, determined by the changing seasons and
responsive only to short-range forecasts, has turned colder thanks to a
cooling cycle that is now into its 17th year.

Giving speeches all
night in the Senate will not change that, but Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse
(D-RI) has partnered with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) to announce a new
“climate change caucus” when you can ask any of the million unemployed
Americans what the Senate’s real priority should be.

Sen.
Whitehouse seems to think that a winter storm that causes “little summer
cottages (be) washed into the sea” makes the non-existent issue of
climate change “a bit personal.” Does this moron take rain or snow
storms personally? When the sun rises in the morning, does he think it
does so just for him?

Democrats are so afraid of the political
fallout from the devastation of Obamacare and the lies told to support
it that they are desperate to divert voter’s attention to anything else
and climate change rates higher than having to discuss why we are still
in a major recession after one full term by President Obama and the
first year of his second. So, between now and the midterm elections in
November, they will engage in all manner of theatrics to stay in office.

Thank
goodness we have men like Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) in office. For a
long time know he has been on record calling climate change—formerly
called global warming—“a hoax.” When he takes a head count, he
finds “fewer and fewer members of the United States Senate that are
sympathetic to this whole cause.”

Behind the climate change
“cause” falsehoods is the intention to impose fees on all aspects of
American business and industry that emit carbon dioxide. Sen. Whitehouse
wants to force up the cost of energy by making the larger emitters pay
for doing what volcanoes do—emit CO2. In addition, all of the Earth’s
living creatures do that as well. Congress has defeated 692 similar
bills.

Sen. Whitehouse and his climate caucus are depending
heavily on the 30% or so voters who still think that global warming is
real. To some extent you can’t blame them. They were taught that in
school and college. They read and hear that it is real in the news media
every day. As of today, however, not one high school graduate has lived
in a period of global warming.

And what is the rest of the
world supposed to think when both British Royal Society and the U.S.
National Academy of Sciences have just released a report, “Climate
Change: Evidence & Causes” that is a rejection and abandonment of
the most fundamental values of science. The report asserts that
“Continued emissions of these gases (CO2 and other greenhouse gases will
cause further climate change, including substantial increases in global
average surface temperatures and important changes in regional
climate.”

Tom Harris, the executive director of the
International Climate Science Coalition, responded saying the report
“does a serious disservice to science and society.” And that is an
understatement. “This is not the language of science…it is appalling
that two of the world’s foremost science bodies should engage in such
unconditional rhetoric.” Not to mention that it is an outright lie.

So,
while the twenty or so desperate Democrats gather all night, keep in
mind that (1) there has been no global warming since 1997, (2) more than
31,000 scientists have signed a petition saying humans are not causing
global warming, (3) Arctic ice is up 50% since 2012, and (4) every one
of the climate computer models predicting warmth has been wrong over and
over again.

Find out if one of those Senators is from your State
and is up for reelection in November. Then vote him or her out of
office and replace them with a candidate who wants smaller government,
less spending, and demonstrates a devotion to both the truth and the
U.S. Constitution.

"Global-Warming / Climate Change POLICY, not the weather, is a threat to National Security in the UK and Europe

Miliband's claims are as deluded as the charge of the light brigade**"

"While
Putin sabre-rattles in the Ukraine and Crimea UK and European political
leaders dither and reel in terror at losing Russian gas supplies.

"YET
it is they who made Britain and Europe impotent by adopting deranged
so-called green energy policies which slashed home produced power of
Coal and sacrificed British and European Energy independence to the
Russian Bear in the name of 'Saving the Planet'.

"Ed Miliband's
wailing outburst that so-called man-made climate change, which he claims
caused the winter storms, is 'a threat to national security' IS AS
DELUDED AS THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE**.

"The FACTS are:-

1. The storms were solar-driven and predicted by WeatherAction*;

2. The notion of man-made Climate change is an anti-scientific and baseless lie.

3.
There is no evidence that changes in CO2 levels in the real world drive
or have ever driven world temperatures or climate in the last hundred,
thousand or million years;

4. The reality is the other way around
and if Mr Miliband and other politicians believe in the deluded
CO2 theory we challenge them to come up with actual evidence and to
organize a public TV debate on the matter between WeatherAction and
others on one side and the Met Office charlatan's like Julia Slingo on
the other.

5. The way to build energy independence and improve living standards in the UK is:

a) Bring back UK coal and any other cheap home-based energy sources

b) Support fracking in safe places

c) Scrap ALL CO2 handouts and green subsidies which are ALL driving up the cost of living.

d)
Repeal the Climate Change Act and terminate all funding of green
parasites in Govt, business and Councils who are guided by it.

e)
Prepare for weather extremes through application of solar-based
long-range forecasts which can be funded by the termination of the Met
Offices failed Long Range ventures which have misled the public for a
decade.

A
constant, mild hiss. That was my chief observation when I
returned to Anadarko Petroleum’s Landon Pad A, a natural-gas site in
Lycoming County, PA. October’s quietude was totally unlike the cyclone
of equipment, personnel and activity that had dominated this spot just
four months before, when Anadarko and the American Petroleum Institute
hosted journalists and policy analysts here.

Back then, engineers
used a pressurized blend of 90% water, 9.5% sand, and 0.5% chemicals to
crack subterranean shale deposits and awaken natural gas that has
slumbered since the dinosaurs died. This hydraulic fracturing, or
“fracking,” occurs some 6,000 feet underground. This is 5,000 feet
beneath the water table – deep enough to bury three Empire State
Buildings.

This spot now resembles the scene of a once-raging
party that has been cleared out and cleaned up. The trucks have driven
off. Dozens of workers have moved on. The cranes are gone. What remains
are three acres of gravel-covered farmland, five completed wells, rising
three to six feet above the soil, and a steady, low-volume whoosh.

This
is the sound of natural gas being captured; counted by a “cash
register” gauge that measures output and thus royalties; and conveyed
via yellow pipes into the broader natural-gas market. The result? Warm
bedrooms on crisp nights and hot showers on cold mornings.

Despite
the shrill complaints of fracking foes, this productive but tranquil
patch demonstrates how much greener fracking is than other power sources
– even “green” ones.

* Fracking should soothe those who fret about CO2.

Since
2002, carbon dioxide output has grown 32 percent globally, Manhattan
Institute senior fellow Robert Bryce wrote for Bloomberg View in
September. “In the U.S., meanwhile, carbon dioxide emissions were 8
percent lower in 2012 than they were in 2002, largely due to a surge in
shale gas production, which has reduced coal use.” Indeed, fracking has
helped America keep its unratified Kyoto Protocol commitments while
other countries decry so-called global warming and yet continue boosting
CO2.

New York City, home of über-frackophobe Yoko Ono, is benefiting enormously from fracking.

“New
York has the cleanest air now of any major American city,” Gotham mayor
Michael Bloomberg told journalists on September 26. Thanks to both
purer heating oil in local buildings and the conversion of others to
natural gas fracked along the Marcellus Shale, New York’s air has not
been this clear in 50 years, officials say.

* Water is a precious resource. So,
conservationists should smile at how little water fracking requires –
compared to other energy sources. According to the U.S. Energy
Department and the Ground Water Protection Council, it typically takes
three gallons of water to produce 1 million British thermal units of
energy from deep-shale natural gas/fracking.

But what about groundwater pollution? The hysteria that fracking poisons drinking water lacks one key ingredient: evidence.

As
former EPA EPA chief Lisa Jackson testified before Congress in
May 2011: “I’m not aware of any proven case where the fracking process
itself has affected water.” Even New York State’s politically
frackophobic Andrew Cuomo administration concluded that “no significant
adverse impact to water resources is likely to occur due to underground
vertical migration of fracturing fluids through the shale formations.” A
December 2011 Department of Environmental Conservation draft report
added that “there is no likelihood of significant adverse impacts from
the underground migration of fracturing fluids.”

* Protecting
habitat is another key eco-priority. Fracking succeeds here, too. An
SAIC/RW Beck study found that natural-gas companies use 0.4 acres of
land to generate a year’s supply of electricity for 1,000 households.
Nuclear power requires 0.7 acres. Coal consumes 0.75 acres. Wind power
needs six acres. And solar cells require 8.4 acres to fuel 1,000
households annually. This is 21 times the habitat impact of natural gas.
So, if you are a Gila monster or a Joshua tree, cheer fracking and hiss
solar.

* What about wildlife?

Anadarko’s Brad Milliken
says rattlesnakes are protected in Pennsylvania, unlike his home state
of Texas. The company, Milliken says, retains “what I would call a
rattlesnake wrangler. If we see a snake, we call him up, and they
relocate the snake temporarily,” until work has been completed. “All of
our contractors understand not to disturb the snakes.”

Before
installing a new pipeline, Anadarko checks for Indiana bats, as they
migrate in May and June. Obstructing their flight paths “changes their
way of life and can be detrimental to their health,” Milliken explains.
In such cases, he says, Anadarko would reroute a pipeline rather than
threaten these bats.

In contrast, the “Earth friendly,”
taxpayer-subsidized wind industry slaughters thousands, perhaps millions
of bats (including Indiana bats) unlucky enough to fly into the giant
Cuisinarts that are their turbines. (My friend Paul Driessen of the
Center For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) has documented this carnage
with tragic eloquence.)

This
is great news for mosquitoes, which do suck human blood. It’s not such
great news for people who fall victim to West Nile virus and other
mosquito-borne diseases.

Could gas producers frack even more
cleanly? Innovation could and gradually will yield still safer and more
Earth-friendly production methods. Cal Cooper of the Apache Corporation
wisely proposed at a Manhattan Institute energy policy conference that
gas companies “could transport fracking chemicals in powder form and mix
them with water at production sites, rather than ship them around in
liquid form, which risks a spill in transit.”

Rather than blindly
decry fracking, environmentalists should encourage more ideas like
Cooper’s. Beyond that, they should embrace fracking for being easy on
the air, water, land and wildlife – in most cases far easier than the
“sustainable” energy sources that ecologists adore.

Via email

Australian PM says Greens are toxic

PRIME Minister Tony Abbott has labelled the Greens as “toxic” in his first salvo for next month’s WA senate election.

Ahead
of a visit to Perth this week, Mr Abbott fired back at a vicious attack
by Greens Senator Scott Ludlam in federal parliament, in which he
labelled the Prime Minister as “homophobic” and “racist”.

The
Prime Minister yesterday labelled the Greens and other minor parties who
were contesting the fresh election as toothless tigers, whose major
contribution to the Australian Parliament was to “attract media
attention”.

He said Mr Ludlam’s attack was water off a duck’s back.

“I am defamed every day in parliament, and I have learnt to be fairly oblivious to it I have got to say,” Mr Abbott said.

“I think West Australians are fairly resistant to the kinds of toxins which emanate from the Greens.”

Laughing he retorted: “I might have to have an extra half glass of good Margaret River wine tonight to console myself.’’

WA
Greens Senator launched a scathing attack on the Prime Minister during
his final parliamentary speech ahead of the April 5 senate vote.

Senator Ludlam invited Mr Abbott to visit WA, but urged him to leave his “excruciatingly boring three-word slogans at home”.

The
speech concludes with Senator Ludlam telling the Prime Minister to take
his “heartless racist exploitation of people’s fears and ram it as far
from Western Australia as your taxpayer funded travel entitlements can
take you”.

“Western Australians are a generous and welcoming lot,
but if you show up waving your homophobia in people’s faces and start
boasting about your ever more insidious attacks on the trade union
movement and all working people, you can expect a very different kind of
welcome.”

WA will vote for six senators on April 5, after the bungled poll in September saw that result quashed.

West Australians have to go back to the polls after 1370 votes were lost.

After
securing three senate positions at the September election, the Liberals
are now in danger of losing one of those positions, which would make it
even more difficult for Mr Abbott to pass legislation in the senate.

He currently holds 33 seats in the senate, but needs 39 to pass laws.

Mr Abbott said losing another Liberal senate position would make it more difficult to scrap the mining and carbon taxes.

“The
election is important because the result will make it easier or harder
to get rid of anti WA taxes like the carbon or mining taxes,” he said.

In
a pot shot at the Greens and minor parties, Mr Abbott said: “Ask
yourself: What do minor parties actually get done, other than make it
harder for government to do its job?

“Minor parties are much
better at attracting media attention rather than getting things
done. “Don’t vote for a minor party and in particular don’t vote
for a minor party that is going to be constantly with the
Opposition. “The Greens are really the second wing faction of the
Labor Party – that’s what they are.

“I think people want a strong
voice in the federal parliament, rather than people who just make a
noise. To do that, you need to vote for people who are part of
government.”

Mr Abbott said West Australians had every right to be angry about having to vote again.

“It
is monumental incompetence,’’ he said. “I am annoyed. I think
everyone is annoyed. “I can’t imagine they (Australian Electoral
Commission) would make the same mistake twice.”

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

9 March, 2014

ObamaCar Replacement Batteries Cost $34,000 According to GM Dealers

Here’s
the good news about the ObamaCar known as the Chevy Volt: There haven’t
been any reported fires connected with the ObamaCar since the company
recalled 8,000 of the electric vehicles—that’s one in six vehicles.

That
is no fires, if you don’t count the people who’ve been “fired” from the
Volt production line as sales continue to make Obama’s “one million”
electric car promise just another broken dream in a crooked scheme.

Obama promised that by the time he finished as president, he’d put a million electric cars on the road.

Thankfully,
he won’t quite make it. No telling how much it would cost to put a
million on the road after calculating the costs of putting 60,000 on
the road.

So far the GM has manufactured only about 62,000 cars, if you count sales of the European model the Ampera.

“Sales
of the Volt meanwhile fell 25.6 percent from February 2013 to 1,210
units last month,” says the GM Authority blog. “And while the Volt still
holds on to the overall sales lead over the Leaf, Volt sales appear to
be slowing in 2014. In January, Chevrolet moved 918 units of the Volt,
down from 1,140 in January 2013 and 2,392 in December 2013.”

“The
Volt saw a boost upwards from a November slump and sold 2,392 units in
December,” says AutoblogGreen. “That puts the plug-in hybrid's annual
total at 23,094, just down from the 23,461 sold in 2012.”

If
Ralph Nader contended that the Corvair was “unsafe at any speed,” then I
contend that the ObamaCar demand has reached it’s apex and is “unwanted
at any price.”

That might be because no one can actually tell buyers what it might cost to replace the batteries in the car.

Continues the AutoblogGreen:

We
called up Keyes Chevrolet in Los Angeles and were quoted a broad price
range of between $3,400 and $34,000 to replace a "drive motor
replacement battery" in a 2012 Volt. Tellingly, perhaps, the dealer we
spoke with was not sure what replacing a 'drive motor replacement
battery' (and the 'Grade B' version, at that) entails, and told us we'd
have to bring a Volt in to see what's wrong with the pack to get a real
estimate. We got the same confusion and numbers to replace the battery
from Berger Chevrolet in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We asked GM to clarify
what this $34,000 charge includes, but that information was not
forthcoming.

GM’s hilarious official response to this was a non
denial denial: "The high end of what you provided is not consistent with
what we would expect the customer to pay," says Kevin Kelly, manager of
electrification technology communications for General Motors.

So THAT’s where the $11 billion…and more… went in the auto bailout that taxpayers got stuck for.

Divide
by two, carry the one and… for only $215,696 per battery taxpayers
could provide FREE batteries to every Chevy Volt owner.

That is if they could rely on a plant to manufacture the things. Because here’s where it gets really silly.

GM
expected sales of the Chevy Volt to be so robust that they got the
government to “invest” $150 million in a third party manufacturing plant
owned by Korean company LG Chem that can produce 50,000 to 600,000
batteries per year.

For a car that’s selling only 25,000 per year? And supposedly has batteries that last 8 years or 100,000 miles?

And still they can’t quite nail down how much it will cost to replace the batteries in the Chevy Volt.

And
that’s the great telltale: We know, despite denials from the White
House and GM, that the Chevy Volt really is an ObamaCarm designed by the
softest minds in the federal hierarchy.

And its problem isn’t
its power source. No. Its problem is the same that all
great, signature ObamaProducts have. Its problem is simple
math. It doesn’t add up.

Here’s
a bright idea. When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issues a
new regulation requiring retrofitting or that some new technology be
used by energy providers, perhaps they should double-check to see if the
technology actually exists yet.

That is the subject of an
amendment to H.R. 3826 by Chairman of the House Science, Space, and
Technology Committee Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) that would ensure that
EPA standards for all types of new power plants are achievable using
existing technology.

The bill itself, sponsored by Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) passed the House by a vote 229-183 on March 6.

Smith
all but called carbon sequestration mandates fictitious in his
statement: “By requiring carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology
that doesn’t even exist, the EPA’s new power plant proposal effectively
bans new coal power. There is no coal power plant anywhere in the world
that can meet the EPA’s radical proposal.”

Under the Clean Air
Act, the EPA is already required to set standards using the “best system
of emission reduction” with technology that has been “adequately
demonstrated.”

The Smith bill would reinforce that aspect of the
law and guarantee that the agency is not setting an impossible standard,
thus killing the electrical grid when no provider could meet the new
requirements.

Coal as a percent of the net electricity generation
has dropped from 49 percent in 2007 to 37 percent in 2012, according to
the Energy Information Agency (EIA). For now, this is being partially
offset by increases in natural gas.

But, that actually represents
a smaller piece of a smaller pie, EIA data shows. While natural gas has
increased electricity production by 330 billion kilowatthours (kWh) to
1.132 trillion kWh a year in 2012, coal production has dropped by 498
billion kWh to 1.5 trillion kWh.

Largely as a result of the coal
plant closures, overall electricity generation in the U.S. has dropped
from 4.005 trillion kilowatthours (kWh) in 2007 to 3.89 trillion kWh in
2012 meanwhile end use has only decreased from 3.89 trillion kWh in to
just 3.832 trillion kWh.

The difference between electricity
generation and end use, or implied spare capacity, has dropped from 115
billion kWh to 58 billion kWh from 2007 to 2012.

That’s a
decrease of almost 50 percent — leading to worries that very soon the
ability to keep up with demand could be compromised and brownouts could
be on the horizon.

But by requiring that providers use technology
that does not even exist as a prerequisite to selling electricity, the
outcome could be devastating, with more than one third of the supply at
risk.

To paraphrase the words of the immortal Harold Ramis, we
could wind up with a grid that is substandard and completely inadequate
for our power needs.

Considering the practical, potential impact
of the new EPA regulation, one has to wonder if that isn’t precisely
what the agency has had in mind all along.

Greenies are passionate about "renewable" resources -- except for practical ones like wood and hydro power

It
seems that even wood isn’t green or renewable enough anymore. The
EPA has recently banned the production and sale of 80 percent of
America’s current wood-burning stoves, the oldest heating method known
to mankind and mainstay of rural homes and many of our nation’s poorest
residents. The agency’s stringent one-size-fits-all rules apply equally
to heavily air-polluted cities and far cleaner plus typically colder
off-grid wilderness areas such as large regions of Alaska and the
American West.

While EPA’s most recent regulations aren’t
altogether new, their impacts will nonetheless be severe. Whereas
restrictions had previously banned wood-burning stoves that didn’t limit
fine airborne particulate emissions to 15 micrograms per cubic meter of
air, the change will impose a maximum 12 microgram limit. To put this
amount in context,EPA estimates that secondhand tobacco smoke in a
closed car can expose a person to 3,000-4,000 micrograms of particulates
per cubic meter.

Most wood stoves that warm cabin and home
residents from coast-to-coast can’t meet that standard. Older stoves
that don’t cannot be traded in for updated types, but instead must be
rendered inoperable, destroyed, or recycled as scrap metal.

The
impacts of EPA’s ruling will affect many families. According to the U.S.
Census Bureau’s 2011 survey statistics, 2.4 million American housing
units (12 percent of all homes) burned wood as their primary heating
fuel, compared with 7 percent that depended upon fuel oil.

Local
governments in some states have gone even further than EPA, not
only banning the sale of noncompliant stoves, but even their use as
fireplaces. As a result, owners face fines for infractions. Puget Sound,
Washington is one such location. Montréal, Canada proposes
to eliminate all fireplaces within its city limits.

She doesn't like food very much either -- by the look of her. An interview with The Guardian and her below

Elizabeth
Kolbert is the author of The Sixth Extinction, which argues that a
catastrophe that may be as significant as the one that wiped out the
dinosaurs is under way around us. But whereas the previous five mass
extinctions were caused by natural phenomena, Kolbert shows us that this
one is manmade. One third of all reef-building corals, a third of all
freshwater molluscs, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all
mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds, says
Kolbert, "are heading towards oblivion".

When did you first hear the phrase the Sixth Extinction, and how did it become the subject of your book?

Not
that long ago. I read a paper in the National Academy of Sciences that
set me down this whole road. That came out in 2008 and it was called Are
We In the Midst of The Sixth Extinction? That was sort of the beginning
of this whole project. Then I wrote a piece for the New Yorker called
"The Sixth Extinction?" , and it involved amphibian-hunting in Panama. I
knew I hadn't scratched the surface, that there was a book there.

Your
previous writing on climate change met with scepticism. Do you think
this broader approach might have a more engaged reception?

Climate
change, especially in the US, has been extraordinarily politicised, and
that is a real barrier to getting people to even think about the issue.
The other issues in the book, which are all contributing to this mass
extinction – invasive species and ocean acidification – have not been
politicised. But acidification is completely the same phenomenon as
global warming. It's all about carbon emissions. Unfortunately the
public discourse has really taken leave of the science and just exists
in its own realm.

The irony of the previous catastrophes is that we wouldn't be here without them…

Yes,
there's a consensus that the dinosaurs were doing just fine 66m years
ago and presumably could have done fine for another 66m years, had their
way of life not been up-ended by an asteroid impact. Life on this
planet is contingent. There's no grand plan for it. We are also
contingent. Yet although we are absolutely part of this long history, we
turn out to be extremely unusual. And what we're doing is quite
possibly unprecedented.

Reading your book, one wonders if it might not be good for the rest of the planet if we died out?

A
few species would be worse off if we weren't here but probably most
would be better off. That's sounds like a radical or misanthropic thing
to say but I think it's evidently true.

It seems that from the moment we arrived we've been busy wiping out species.

There
is incontrovertible evidence that when people reached Australia, 50,000
years ago, they precipitated the extinction of many species. Giant
marsupials, giant tortoises, a huge bird – all were gone within a couple
of thousand years of people arriving.

Those "people" arriving were Aborigines -- one of those wonderful primitive people who lived in harmony with nature!

The Obama Administration is trying to regulate Americans’ livelihoods away. Will Congress do anything to stop it?

The
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is pushing regulation of
“greenhouse gases”—something even its own officials have admitted would
have no noticeable impact on the climate. New Heritage research
shows the devastating impact it would have, however, on American
manufacturing jobs.

EPA regulation has been dubbed the “war on
coal,” but Heritage’s Nicolas Loris and Filip Jolevski report that “the
casualties will extend well beyond the coal industry, hurting families
and businesses and taking a significant toll on American manufacturing
across the nation.”

Just what would happen if these regulations
went forward? Jolevski and Loris, the Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow,
found that by the end of 2023 (emphasis added):

"nearly 600,000
jobs will be lost, a family of four’s income will drop by $1,200 per
year, and aggregate gross domestic product decreases by $2.23 trillion"

And
they broke down those numbers on the local level. You can actually see
just how many manufacturing jobs would vanish in your own state and
congressional district. A few notable points:

Average of more than 770 jobs losses per congressional districtDistricts in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois hit especially hard

19 out of the top 20 worse off congressional districts located in the Midwest

As
if that weren’t enough, this extends beyond local jobs. The negative
effects on manufacturing and other energy-intensive industries would
damage America’s competitiveness in the world, in addition to hurting
those at home.

Squeezing major energy sources like coal would
drive up energy prices—and that hits poor Americans the hardest. They
are already spending a higher proportion of their income on running
their households.

The House is scheduled to vote today on a bill
that would tie greenhouse gas regulations to standards on economic
damage vs. environmental benefits. But as Loris and Jolevski said,
“Congress should stop the EPA and all other federal agencies from
regulating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.”

The
Obama Administration is already going around Congress to accomplish
many parts of its agenda. Members of Congress shouldn’t let bureaucrats
bypass them to kill jobs.

Disaster
looming, says the director of the Global Change Institute at the
University of Queensland, writing for EarthHour.org. But to quote
Mandy Rice-Davies, "But he WOULD say that, wouldn't he?"

I
have had a look at Hoagy's "report" and the evidence he musters for bad
things happening is mostly quotations from his own writings and the the
writings of his fellow Warmists. Andrew Bolt points out that other reef scientists say the reef is doing fine and bounces back swiftly from setbacks.

Hoagy's
own research showed a resilient reef a few years ago and Hoagy
retreated into embarrassed silence for a while but the embarrassment
seems to have faded. Maybe he needed to do a screech to hang on to his
job.

But a point that nobody can deny is that the reef is most
luxuriant in the WARMEST part of its range e.g. the Torres Strait.
The reef LIKES warmth

The Great Barrier Reef will suffer
“irreversible” damage by 2030 unless radical action is taken to lower
carbon emissions, a stark new report has warned.

Unless
temperatures are kept below the internationally agreed limit of 2C
warming on pre-industrial levels, the reef will cease to be a
coral-dominated ecosystem, the report warns.

Coral bleaching,
which occurs when water becomes too warm and coral’s energy source is
decimated, is now a “serious threat” to the reef, having not been
documented in the region prior to 1979.

The increase in carbon
dioxide pumped into the atmosphere, 90% of which is absorbed by the
oceans, has already caused a 30% rise in the hydrogen ions that cause
ocean acidification. This process hinders the ability of corals to
produce the skeletal building blocks of reefs.

Co-author Ove
Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at the
University of Queensland, told Guardian Australia that current climate
trends signal “game over” for the Great Barrier Reef.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

7 March, 2014

DC’s green-approved buildings using more energy

Washington,
D.C. may have the highest number of certified green buildings in the
country, but research by Environmental Policy Alliance suggests it
might not be doing much good.

The free-market group analyzed the
first round of energy usage data released by city officials Friday and
found that large, privately-owned buildings that received the green
energy certification Leadership in Energy Design (LEED) actually use
more energy than buildings that didn’t receive this green stamp of
approval.

LEED is the brainchild of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a private environmental group.

Washington,
D.C.’s Department of Environment made the capital the first city in the
nation to mandate LEED certifications in the construction of public
buildings. The standards are now being phased in.

The results are
measured in EUI’s, a unit that relates a building’s energy consumption
to its size; the higher the number, the more energy is expended by a
smaller building.

Take the Green Building Council’s Washington
headquarters. Replete with the group’s top green-energy accolade, the
platinum LEED certification, the USGBC’s main base comes in at 236 EUI.
The average EUI for uncertified buildings in the capital? Just 199.

Certified buildings’ average comes in at 205 EUI, still less efficient than that didn’t take home the ultimate green trophy.

“LEED
certification is little more than a fancy plaque displayed by these
‘green’ buildings,” charged Anastasia Swearingen, LEED Exposed’s lead
researcher on the project. “Previous analyses of energy use by
LEED-certified buildings have consistently shown that LEED ratings have
no bearing on actual energy efficiency.”

Marcia
McNutt, former head of the U.S. Geological Survey under President
Barack Obama until 2013 and now top editor at Science magazine, is no
longer opposed to the approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

“I
believe it is time to move forward on the Keystone XL pipeline to
transport crude oil from the tar sands deposits of Alberta, Canada, and
from the Williston Basin in Montana and North Dakota to refineries on
the U.S. Gulf Coast,” McNutt wrote in a Feb. 21 editorial in the
magazine.

Keystone is a proposed 1,179-mile 36-inch diameter
pipeline that will transport crude oil from Hardisty, Alberta, Canada to
Steele City, Neb., according to the website of TransCanada, the company
in charge of the project.

“Along with transporting crude oil
from Canada, the Keystone XL Pipeline will also support the significant
growth of crude oil production in the United States from producers in
the Bakken region of Montana and North Dakota,” the explanation on the
company’s website stated.

A summary of McNutt’s commentary is
available on Science magazine website, but subscription is required to
access the whole article:“I drive a hybrid car and set my thermostat
at 80°F in the Washington, DC, summer,” McNutt wrote. “I use public
transportation to commute to my office, located in a building given
‘platinum’ design status by the U.S. Green Building Council.

“The
electric meter on my house runs backward most months of the year,
thanks to a large installation of solar panels,” McNutt wrote. “I am
committed to doing my part to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and
minimize global warming.

“At the same time, I believe it is time
to move forward on the Keystone XL pipeline to transport crude oil from
the tar sands deposits of Alberta, Canada, and from the Williston Basin
in Montana and North Dakota to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast,”
McNutt wrote.

In a Feb. 20 article in the National Journal, more
of McNutt’s editorial is quoted, including her stating that the pipeline
could be safer and more regulated than transportation of crude oil by
rail or truck.

"No method for moving hydrocarbons can be
considered completely fail-safe,” McNutt is quoted as saying in the
article. “At least the current permitting process can, and should, be
used to ensure that Keystone XL sets new standards for environmental
safety.

“There is no similar leverage on the truck and rail
transportation options, which produce higher GHG emissions and have a
greater risk of spills, at a higher cost for transport," McNutt wrote.

When
interviewed for a National Public Radio article on Feb. 21, McNutt said
Canadian crude oil would be used one way or another.

“Just because there hasn't been a pipeline really did not stop the development of the Canadian tar sands,” McNutt said.

“They
were going to be developed anyway, you're saying?” Greene said.
“Yeah,” McNutt said. “In fact, they are developed anyway.

“Rather
than putting the oil in a pipeline, they are now putting the oil on
trucks and railway cars, and trucks and trains actually use more fossil
fuels themselves to get that crude oil to market than a pipeline,”
McNutt
said.

Greene then stated that the pipeline “might be the cleanest of the options.”

“Not
only the cleanest, but potentially safer, because the pipeline is still
to be permitted. Environmentalists can demand the pipeline be the
safest ever engineered,” McNutt said. “One of the reasons for opposing
the pipeline is the emissions of greenhouse gases when the tar sands are
converted to a liquid to put into the pipeline.

“There actually
could be some concessions in exchange for approving the pipeline that
could require a limit on the carbon emissions in that process,” McNutt
said, adding that the pipeline “is the very cheapest way” to transport
crude oil, which could free up funding for “renewable energy.”

This
week the environmental movement suffered its biggest defeat since
Climategate. And at the hands of its most hated enemy: Big Oil.

Here
are the reasons why the court ruling by a US federal judge that Chevron
should not have to pay $9.5 billion in damages to victims of oil
pollution in Ecuador is a victory for common sense and justice which we
should all be celebrating.

1. It's not about David v Goliath.

Though,
of course, that's how it was spun by the left-liberal media: on the one
hand, plucky maverick New York lawyer Steven Donziger, representing
thousands of Ecuadorean natives whose forest lands had been polluted; on
the other, the oil giant Chevron, America's third largest company.

But
if anyone was being bullied here, it was Chevron. As Donziger well
knew, it is almost impossible for an oil company to get a fair hearing
in a world brainwashed by environmentalist propaganda. Chevron knew this
too. It could have settled for much less out of court - and most oil
companies in its position probably would have done. However, Chevron's
chief executive John S Watson took the bold and principled decision to
fight it all the way.

2. Chevron had done nothing wrong. No really.

The
damage was done in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties in the Oriente
region of Ecuador by Texaco and the national oil company Petroecuador.

Texaco
later reached a settlement with the Ecuadorian government whereby it
paid $40 million to clear up the 37 per cent of oil damage for which it
accepted responsibility; the rest were assumed to be the responsibility
of the Ecuador national oil company (which didn't clear up its share).

Chevron
has never drilled in Ecuador. But when a Chevron subsidiary absorbed
Texaco in 2001 it became a target for environmentalists who still held
Texaco partly responsible for the remaining pollution.

3. The case against Chevron was rigged.

In
2011, an Ecuadorian court ordered Chevron to pay $19 billion in damages
to the native people allegedly poisoned by oil spills. This was
subsequently reduced by the Ecuadorian National Court of Justice to $9.5
billion. Chevron appealed on the grounds that the case was fraudulent -
extortion of "greenmail" masquerading as concern for the environment.
This has now been confirmed by US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in a
500-page ruling.

4. Read the ruling: it's great entertainment!

As
Judge Kaplan says in his highly-readable summary "This case is
extraordinary. The facts are many and sometimes complex. They include
things that normally only come out of Hollywood..."

Indeed. What
Kaplan concluded beyond reasonable doubt was that Donziger's case was
constructed on a web of lies, deceit and corruption.

The initial
expert assessments of the damage had been conducted by a man driving
past the pollution sites at 50 mph; the supposedly neutral and
independent expert testimony had been in fact written by a US
environmental company in the pay of Donziger; the presiding judge had
been bribed with a promised $500,000; the judge's decision had been
written for him by the plaintiffs; Ecuador's left wing president Rafael
Correa - a close ally of the late Hugo Chavez of Venezuela - had
cheerled the affair.

4. Donziger's dodgy past.

"I feel
like I have gone over to the dark side" wrote Donziger in one
incriminating email. What possibly could have caused this? I make no
comment whatsoever on this biographical detail from a profile in The New
Yorker. It seems that he belonged to the same Harvard Law School year
group as one Barack Obama. Apparently they played basketball together.

5. Green Greed

Donziger stood personally to make $600 million from the litigation should it prove successful.

Other
companies lured to the trough included an investment company called
Burford Capital (which planned originally to invest $15 million to help
fund the case in return for a 5.545 per cent share of the $9.5 billion
proceeds - but pulled out, having only "invested" $4 million, after it
smelt a rat); and also the large, left-wing Washington lobbying and law
firm Patton Boggs which stood to make hefty contingency fees from the
affair - and whose future now may be in jeopardy, no doubt causing tears
of real sadness among Republicans across DC.

Two years ago,
partner James E Tyrrell Jr told a Washington district court: "If someone
seriously suggests that [the] 50-year-old law firm of Patton Boggs
would wreck, would risk its professional reputation for a group of
Ecuadorans whose case we feel strongly about, that we would be involved
in a broad fraud, I suggest whoever might believe that: I have a bridge
in New York I might like to try to sell them."

Take us to the bridge, James. Where's that confounded bridge?

6. Green parasites.

Among
the other organisations shown in a deeply unflattering light by the
court ruling is a Colorado-based environmental consultancy - regularly
employed by various branches of government - called Stratus Consulting.
The original Ecuador legal case required an independent environmental
expert to present the court with impartial advice on how much pollution
had been caused by Texaco and how much ought to be paid in damages.

Supposedly
this was the work of an independent local expert named Cabrera. In fact
however, on Donziger's instructions, Cabrera's testimony was in fact
written for him by Stratus - which went to the trouble of disguising
this fact by writing in the first person and then having its words
translated into Spanish. It was Stratus which came up with an arbitrary
damages figure - $16.3 billion.

Then, in a further act of
deception calculated to make Cabrera's "independent" assessment look
more plausible, Stratus prepared a series of criticisms of the report
(which it had itself written) which could then be put to Cabrera by the
plaintiffs, so that they could pretend to attack him in court for not
going far enough...

Anyone familiar with the myriad environmental
consultancies which have sprung up to take advantage of the lucrative
green money machine will know that this kind of behaviour is par for the
course. Really, the only unusual thing about this particular example is
that Stratus were found out in a court of law.

7. The complicit media: if it's green it must be good.

There
have been several long articles about the Chevron/Ecuador story - one
in The New Yorker, one in Vanity Fair, one in Bloomberg Business Week -
each one more sympathetic to Donziger than to Chevron.

The same
has been true virtually everywhere the story has been reported in the
media from The New York Times and the Telegraph to the Guardian and The
Huffington Post.

This isn't just lazy journalism. It's a salutory
reminder of the degree to which our media, not just on the left but in
corners of the centre right, is in thrall to the green propaganda
machine.

8. The usual rent-a-celeb suspects weigh in...

Among
those who championed Donziger's cause were Mia Farrow, Sting, Trudy
Styler and Darryl Hannah. Pop stars and rich people who've been in
movies: is there ANYTHING they don't know about the environment?

9. Big Green sticks its oar in too.

No
green campaign is complete without a few ad hoc, allegedly grassroots
campaign groups there to give the illusion of diverse and committed
support: Amazon Watch and Rainforest Action Network both supported the
campaign against Chevron. So too, inevitably, did the Sierra Club.

"I
have tremendous professional respect for Steven," says Michael Brune,
executive director of the Sierra Club. "He is the driving force behind
what's probably the most important environmental lawsuit in the world
seeking to hold an oil company accountable for its actions."

10. Green hubris.

Almost
none of this information would have come to light in court if Donziger
had not made one fatal mistake. In a supreme act of arrogance, he
decided to turn his legal adventures into a Michael-Moore-style
documentary with himself as the crusading hero negotiating his way
through a corrupt legal system, battling a powerful and heartless oil
giant, on behalf of the ordinary people of Ecuador. The movie -
inevitably - was premiered at the Sundance Festival.

Donziger was
under the illusion that this supposedly independent (though not really)
movie could not be used in evidence. Judge Kaplan thought differently
and subpoenaed 600 hours of footage.

This enabled the court to
demonstrate some entertaining contrasts between what Donziger said about
the Ecuadorean legal system in court - ie that its decision was
reliable - and what he said about it in the various outtakes from Crude.

"They're all corrupt! It's - it's their birthright to be corrupt."

"These judges are really not very bright."

"I've never seen such utter weakness. It's the same kind of weakness that leads to corruption."

It was, as we now know, Donziger himself who was doing all the corrupting in this case.

Conclusion

The
reason this case is so important is because it very nearly didn't
happen. Though environmental activists like Michael Mann, James Hansen
and Al Gore often like to claim that their enemies are in the pay of Big
Oil, the truth is the exact opposite.

Few corporate entities
pump quite so much money into environmental causes as the Big Oil
companies - Shell sponsored the Guardian's environment pages; BP
invested heavily in renewables as part of its Beyond Petroleum
rebranding under the card-carrying greenie CEO Lord Browne - because for
years they have been running scared of the green movement, because
they're big enough to wear the additional costs of green regulation and
because it suits them to "greenwash" their image.

What none of
them seems to have learned is that when you pay Danegeld to your natural
enemy it only makes him greedy for more of the same.

This is why
we should all be applauding the decision by Chevron's CEO John S Watson
(no relation of Sea Shepherd's Paul Watson, it seems likely) to fight
this case. It represents a victory not just for the Chevron shareholder,
but for all those who believe in the capitalist system and are sick and
tired the way so rarely it seems prepared to grow a pair and stand up
for itself.

For too long it has been held hostage by a minority
of hard left, deep green activists whose anti-capitalist agenda has been
given a veneer of respectability by the intervention of high end law
firms, glossy environmental consultancies, Hollywood campaigners,
"caring" grassroots pressure groups, expert scientific witnesses,
"independent" moviemakers and sympathetic mainstream media coverage.

It
happens all the time, all around the world, and usually they get away
with it. This time they didn't. The good guys fought back - and won.

As
a former Greenpeace insider, Patrick Moore wasn’t surprised by the
heated reaction from the left on his explosive testimony about climate
change last week before a Senate committee.

Mr. Moore drew
headlines for disputing the environmental movement’s doomsday scenario,
depicting climate change over the past century as “minor warming” and
arguing that “there is no scientific proof that human emissions of
carbon dioxide are the dominant cause.”

As a result, Mr. Moore
came under fire for “climate denial” from the liberal group Media
Matters for America. He has been persona non grata at Greenpeace for
years.

Mr. Moore dismisses such criticism as an “ad hominem
personal attack that doesn’t have anything to do with the subject at
hand.” At the same time, he doesn’t mind taking a swipe at those who
advocate drastic emissions reductions in the name of stopping climate
change.

“I describe the climate change movement as a combination
of an extreme political ideology and a religious cult all rolled into
one,” said Mr. Moore. “It’s a very, very dangerous social phenomenon. It
causes them to think they have the right to dictate what we do.”

The
Canadian ecologist has long been a thorn in the side of Greenpeace,
which carries two statements on its website disputing his credentials as
an environmentalist.

“While it is true that Patrick Moore was a
member of Greenpeace in the 1970s, in 1986 he abruptly turned his back
on the very issues he once passionately defended,” says a Greenpeace
statement. “He claims he ‘saw the light’ but what Moore really saw was
an opportunity for financial gain.”

Mr. Moore often is described
as a Greenpeace co-founder, which Greenpeace officials dispute, but it’s
safe to say that he was there almost from the start. The group that
became Greenpeace was founded in 1970; Mr. Moore joined a year later and
quickly assumed a leadership role.

“I don’t claim that has
necessarily any overwhelming importance, whether I was a founder or not,
but the fact is I was there at the beginning, even before it was called
Greenpeace,” said Mr. Moore. “I was on the first voyage, and I played a
very central role in the organization for 15 years.”

He said he
left because he was alarmed by the shift in the organization’s goals.
Greenpeace was originally about saving the environment and ending the
threat of nuclear war. Over time, he said, the “green” overtook the
“peace.”

“By the time I left in ‘86, Greenpeace had drifted into a
position of characterizing humans as the enemies of the Earth, a cancer
on the planet,” said Mr. Moore. “One of my main contentions is that to
see humans as separate from nature and the ecology and the environment
is defying the most important first law of ecology, which is that we are
all part of nature.”

Teaching children that “the human species
is a separate, evil thing from nature is extremely damaging to their
orientation of life,” he said.

He said environmentalists have
attempted to discredit him because his remarks are devastating to the
climate change movement. The path to significantly lowered emissions in
the name of combating climate change leads to some alarming places, he
said, namely a world with greater poverty and less democracy.

The
climate change argument “gives them an overarching policy framework to
dictate human civilization,” said Mr. Moore. “It basically allows them
to say what the energy policy should be, which is the key policy
underlying the whole of modern civilization.”

A
new report published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation
shows that the best observational evidence indicates our climate is
considerably less sensitive to greenhouse gases than climate models are
estimating.

The clues for this and the relevant scientific papers
are all referred to in the recently published Fifth Assessment report
(AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

However,
this important conclusion was not drawn in the full IPCC report – it is
only mentioned as a possibility – and is ignored in the IPCC’s Summary
for Policymakers (SPM).

For over thirty years climate scientists
have presented a range for climate sensitivity (ECS) that has hardly
changed. It was 1.5-4.5°C in 1979 and this range is still the same today
in AR5. The new report suggests that the inclusion of recent evidence,
reflected in AR5, justifies a lower observationally-based temperature
range of 1.25–3.0°C, with a best estimate of 1.75°C, for a doubling of
CO2. By contrast, the climate models used for projections in AR5
indicate a range of 2-4.5°C, with an average of 3.2°C.

This is
one of the key findings of the new report Oversensitive: how the IPCC
hid the good news on global warming, written by independent UK climate
scientist Nic Lewis and Dutch science writer Marcel Crok. Lewis and Crok
were both expert reviewers of the IPCC report, and Lewis was an author
of two relevant papers cited in it.

In recent years it has become
possible to make good empirical estimates of climate sensitivity from
observational data such as temperature and ocean heat records. These
estimates, published in leading scientific journals, point to climate
sensitivity per doubling of CO2 most likely being under 2°C for
long-term warming, with a best estimate of only 1.3-1.4°C for warming
over a seventy year period.

These lower,
observationally-based estimates for both long-term climate sensitivity
and the seventy-year response suggest that considerably less global
warming and sea level rise is to be expected in the 21st century than
most climate model projections currently imply.

“We estimate that
on the IPCC’s second highest emissions scenario warming would still be
around the international target of 2°C in 2081-2100,” Lewis says.

Sharks
do what Greenies would like to do: Reduce the human
population. Greenies are would-be super sharks so no wonder they
like sharks

SEA Shepherd has failed to secure a court
injunction to force the suspension of the West Australian government's
shark culling program, with its lawyer saying the "heart" has been
ripped from the case.

The marine activists launched the
fast-tracked legal challenge on Wednesday last week, seeking to have
dozens of baited drumlines off Perth and the South West region removed.

Their
argument questioned the validity of an exemption under the Environment
Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, granted by federal
environment minister Greg Hunt, which allowed the state government to
kill any protected great white, tiger or bull shark bigger than three
metres caught in certain zones.

The exemption runs until the end of the trial program on April 30, but Sea Shepherd wanted it stopped immediately.

Their lawyers argued the exemption was not valid as it was not published in an official government gazette.

But on Wednesday, Judge James Edelman disagreed and decided against granting the injunction.

Patrick
Pearlman, principal solicitor for WA's Environmental Defender's Office,
who led the action for Sea Shepherd, said hopes of a judicial review
had been extinguished.

"In ruling on the preliminary question of
whether the exemption is valid, he has in essence taken the heart out of
the case," Mr Pearlman told reporters. "We're obviously
disappointed. We thought we had a very good argument. It's a very legal,
technical argument."

Mr Pearlman maintained the exemption should
have been gazetted so parliamentarians had the chance to examine,
debate and vote upon it. "Then, I think, every member of
parliament would be able to be on the record and say whether they think
this program is a good idea."

He said an appeal would be considered.

There
was still a chance the state government could be forced to remove the
drumlines before the trial ended, Mr Pearlman said, with the WA
Environmental Protection Authority still considering whether to assess
the program.

With the WA government's lawyers now seeking to slug
Sea Shepherd with court costs, the activist group faces a bill of up to
$19,000. But it was worth it, Mr Hansen said. "We had to
have a shot at this," he said. "We will continue no matter what
because we have right on our side."

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

On
February 20th, the noted meteorologist, Dr. Roy W. Spencer, fed up with
being called a “denier” of global warming, posted a commentary on his
blog titled “Time to push back against the global warming Nazis.”

“When
politicians and scientists started calling people like me ‘deniers’,
they crossed the line. They are still doing it,” said Dr. Spencer. “They
indirectly equate (1) the skeptics’ view that global warming is not
necessarily all manmade nor a serious problem with (2) the denial that
the Nazi’s extermination of millions of Jews ever happened.” The
Holocaust happened, but global warming’s latest natural cycle ended
about 17 years ago and, as a lot of people have noticed, it has been
getting cold since then.

“Like the Nazis,” said Dr. Spencer,
“they advocate the supreme authority of the state (fascism), which in
turn supports their scientific research to support their cause…”
In the case of global warming, this huge hoax was put forth by the
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The UN
would like to be the world’s global government, but that’s not going to
happen. In the meantime, the IPCC provided scientists that cooperated
with lots of money for their alleged research, all of which “proved”
that carbon dioxide was dramatically heating the Earth. Others like Al
Gore made millions selling “carbon credits”. Along the way, both Gore
and the IPCC received a Nobel Peace Prize.

Dr. Spencer received a
Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. He
was a Senior Scientists for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space
Flight Center where he and a colleague, Dr. John Christy received NASA’s
Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature
monitoring work with satellites. He became a Principal Research
Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001 and
continues to advise NASA as a U.S. Science Team Leader. As he
points out on his blog, his research has been supported by U.S.
government agencies, so the usual claim by Greens that he is a paid
stooge of Big Oil just doesn’t work in his case.

Dr. Spencer’s
decision to call a Nazi a Nazi ignited a lot of discussion among the
global warming hustlers and those whom they have been calling “deniers”
for many years. I always found it particularly offensive, but I suspect
those I called charlatans and hustlers felt the same way. The
difference, however, is the connotation applied to the term, “denier.”
Even today anti-Semites of various descriptions deny that six million
Jews died in the death camps of Nazi Germany during World War Two along
with millions Christians and Eastern Slavic Europeans

What makes
this particularly offensive and horrid is the fact that those in the
Nazi leadership under Adolf Hitler were all environmentalists, deeply
committed to conservation and similar expressions that put the Earth
above the value of human life.

This is all revealed in a book by
R. Mark Musser, “Nazi Oaks”, now in its third printing. Musser was
introduced to environmentalism at Evergreen State College in Olympia,
Washington, from which he graduated in 1989. In 1994 he received Master
of Divinity and spent seven years as a missionary to Belarus and in the
Ukraine.

Musser’s book is absolutely astonishing as he documents
how “Green” the Nazis were from their earliest years until their defeat.
It was Heinrich Himmler, the Reich Leader from 1929 to 1945, who was
responsible for the “Final Solution”, the mass killing of Europe’s Jews.
He led the Nazi party’s SS.

As Musser notes, “The Nazis were
trying to eliminate both global capitalism and international communism
in order to recover a reverence for nature lost in the modern
cosmopolitan world.” The Nazis also held Judeo-Christian values in
contempt.

“That this evolutionary Nazi nature religion was
clothed in secular biology and colored by environmental policies and
practices, is a historical truth that has been ignored and underreported
for too long a time in all the discussions about the Holocaust,” writes
Musser.

I am inclined to believe that it is no accident that the
global warming charlatans began to use the term “deniers” to describe
skeptics.

By 2011, a Gallup poll that surveyed people in 111
countries revealed that most of the human race did not see global
warming as a serious threat. Still, worldwide 42% told Gallup that they
thought global warming was either ‘somewhat serious’ or ‘very serious.’
That was down from 63% in polls taken in 2007 and 2008 in the U.S.

More
than just a spat between scientists, in April 2012, the Congressional
Research Service estimated that, since 2008, the federal government had
spent nearly $70 billion on ‘climate change activities.’ That kind
of money could build or repair a lot of bridges and roads. It could
fund elements of our military. It could be spent on something other than
a climate over which neither the government nor anyone in the world has
any influence.

Bursting onto the national stage, Dr. Spencer’s
decision to call the global warming scientists Nazis for their efforts
to intimidate or smear the reputations of those whose research disputes
their claims, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. a Wall Street Journal columnist,
wrote on March 1 that “Surely some kind of ending is upon us. Last week
climate protesters demanded the silencing of Charles Krauthammer for a
Washington Post column that notices uncertainties in the global warming
hypothesis.”

“In coming weeks,” wrote Jenkins, “a libel trial
gets under way brought by Penn State’s Michael Mann, author of the famed
"hockey stick" graph (Editor’s note: an IPCC graph Mann created that
asserted a sudden, major increase in heat has been widely debunked)
against the National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute,
writer Rand Simberg and roving commentator Mark Steyn for making
wisecracks about his climate work.”

Revelations of several
thousand emails between IPCC scientists, one of whom was Mann, were
christened “climategate” and demonstrated the efforts in which they
engaged to suppress the publication of any papers that questioned global
warming in scientific journals. As the climate turned cooler, they
became increasingly alarmed.

What we are likely witnessing are
the long death throes of the global warming hoax. Calling those
scientists and others like myself “deniers” and other names simply
reveals the desperation of those who are seeing a great source of money
slip away under the spotlight of scientific truth, nor will they be able
to impose their lies on the rest of us.

Ukraine could hold more than 40 trillion cubic feet of recoverable shale gas, enough to satisfy decades of demand

Natural
gas was the origin of the crisis in Ukraine. The country serves as a
transit point for about 6 billion cubic feet per day of Russia’s natgas
exports into Europe. That’s about 2.2 trillion cubic feet per year, or
14% of Europe’s total supply.

More than just serving as a
middleman for Russian gas, Ukraine is like the dealer who got hooked on
his own supply. Under the terms of its last supply deal, Gazprom agreed
to sell gas to Ukraine at $7.70 per thousand cubic feet, a 33% discount
to what European customers pay (but a big premium to U.S. gas prices of
roughly $4.50 per mcf). Moscow even agreed to gradually buy $15 billion
of new Ukrainian bonds, to keep the country from defaulting on other
debts.

Yet even at that discounted price, Ukraine has had a tough
time paying Gazprom’s invoices. Earlier today Russia suggested that if
Ukraine didn’t pay its $1.5 billion gas bill Gazprom might just shut off
the valves and renege on those price discounts. Since 2006, Putin has
twice cut off the gas to Ukraine, most recently in 2009.

Edward
Chow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in
this essay last December that Ukraine’s being “addicted to cheap gas …
has blocked the modernization of its industry, economy and politics.”

Ukraine
has been a junkie for Russian gas. Putin clearly had no problem with
that; it is in Russia’s interest to keep Ukraine and Europe hooked on
Russian gas at prices just low enough to quash incentives to drill and
frack for shale gas. Russia’s state-run news and propaganda outlets have
for years disseminated articles critical of fracking and supported
opponents of the technique, despite its 50-year track record of proven
efficacy and scant mishaps.

Even Ukraine’s ousted President
Yanukovich, despite his dealmaking with Russia, had clearly acquiesced
to pressure to explore Ukraine’s other energy options. Last year Ukraine
signed natural gas exploration deals with Royal Dutch Shell as well as
Chevron, which pledged to invest as much as $10 billion if adequate
supplies of shale gas were found. The government said it hoped the two
companies’ projects would add more than 50% to Ukraine’s current
domestic natgas supply. Ukraine could hold more than 40 trillion cubic
feet of recoverable shale gas, enough to satisfy decades of demand.

Now
with Yanukovich gone it’s as if Putin has taken the Crimea as a kind of
hostage — collateral to hold against what Ukraine owes Russia for gas. A
few billion dollars in IOUs is, of course, a less than flimsy pretext
for thuggery. Which is why the Kremlin’s propaganda machine has been
spreading lies about how his soldiers are there to save Ukraine’s ethnic
Russians from right-wing crazies.

The desperation of Putin’s
actions underscore the threat that shale gas development really does
pose to Russia’s gas-fueled diplomacy.

Even if Gazprom were to
cut off gas supplies to Ukraine, there is no real fear of a gas shortage
in Europe, according to Bernstein Research. This winter has been a warm
one in the region (as witnessed by the balmy temps for the Sochi
Olympics), so demand for heating has not been as great. Thus, natural
gas volumes in storage are higher than average, at about 50% of
capacity.

What’s more, even if Russia did halt shipments through
Ukraine, there’s enough extra space in the Nord Stream pipeline running
from Russia into Germany to pick up about half of the slack.

The
rest of any shortfall could likely be met with greater imports of
superchilled LNG. Europe has been building more gas storage in recent
years precisely to balance out Russia’s influence and to position itself
to receive LNG not just from established gas giants like Qatar, but
also from giant new projects in Australia, a host of planned export
terminals in the U.S. and even new developments in the works offshore
Israel.

Insurer
Warren Buffett says global warming not causing extreme weather,
and he should know. If he gets it wrong he loses money

Business
magnate Warren Buffett contradicted a major Obama administration
talking point by saying that global warming was not causing extreme
weather.

The CEO of Berkshire Hathaway told CNBC that he has not
changed the way his companies calculate the likelihood of a natural
disaster because of global warming.

Berkshire Hathaway owns
several insurance companies that often have to pay out huge claims when
natural disasters strike. Environmentalists and the Obama administration
have warned that global warming has caused natural disasters like
hurricanes to become fiercer and more common.

But Buffett’s
experience leads him to believe otherwise, saying that insuring against
hurricanes in the U.S. has been a profitable venture in recent years as
only a few storms have actually made landfall.

“I think that the
public has the impression that because there has been so much talk about
climate, that events of the last 10 years, from an insured standpoint
on climate, have been unusual,” Buffett told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “The
answer is, they haven’t.”

“You read about these events, but you read about events 30, or 40, or 50 years ago,” he added.

Buffett’s
comments fly in the face of efforts by the Obama administration to tie
weather events to global warming. Recently, President Obama traveled to
drought-stricken California to announce his plan for a $1 billion fund
to prepare communities for the impact of global warming.

“Climate
change is a fact. And when our children’s children look us in the eye
and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world
with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say, ‘Yes, we did,’”
Obama said in his 2014 State of the Union Address.

But
scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Research by University of
Colorado climate scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. found that weather events
have not been getting more extreme due to global warming.

In
particular, Pielke found that hurricanes “have not increased in the U.S.
in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since at least 1900.”

Pielke
also noted that the costs of disasters have not been increasing either,
when economic and population growth are taken into account. For
example, the economic losses from floods have fallen 75 percent as a
percentage of GDP since 1940.

Does Climate Change Cause Extreme Weather? I Said No, and Was Attacked by the administration

BY ROGER PIELKE JR.

Last
Friday, the White House posted on its website a six-page criticism of
me by the president’s science advisor, John Holdren, expanding on
testimony he had given to Congress last week claiming that my views on
climate change and extreme weather are outside of "mainstream scientific
opinion.” Holdren was specifically responding to Senate testimony I
gave last year where I argued that recent extreme weather events,
including hurricanes, droughts, floods, and tornadoes, have not
increased in recent decades due to human-caused climate change.

In
this debate the facts are on my side. The claims I made in my
congressional testimony are no different from the ones made by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ("Long-term trends in economic
disaster losses adjusted for wealth and population increases have not
been attributed to climate change, but a role for climate change has not
been excluded") and broadly supported in the peer-reviewed scientific
literature. Even Warren Buffett recently explained that more extreme
events haven't affected his insurance investments, but that "I love
apocalyptic predictions" because they increase insurance rates, earning
him more money. When Holdren links specific weather events to
human-caused climate change—such as the California drought or the cold
winter—he is exaggerating the state of scientific understandings.

His
subsequent attack on me has him serving not as science advisor to the
president, but rather wielding his political position to delegitimize an
academic whose views he finds inconvenient. We academics wouldn't stand
for such behavior under George W. Bush and we shouldn't under Barack
Obama either.

Our debate aside, Holdren’s exaggerations on
climate science will make it harder, not easier, to establish a
bipartisan consensus for action on climate change.

As background,
I am an expert on the relationship between natural disasters and
climate change. I have published extensively in the scientific,
peer-reviewed literature over the past several decades. I believe the
basic science of climate change is sound and has been for decades.
Humans influence the climate today and will into the future, mainly
through the emission of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels,
and this influence poses unknown, but potentially large and
irreversible risks in the future. The conclusions lay at the core of the
work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which despite a
few missteps along the way, has well-summarized these fundamental
understandings.

Moreover, I have argued for nearly two decades
that stronger policy action is needed by nations to both mitigate and
adapt to climate change. I have called for a carbon tax linked to
greater government spending on energy technology innovation. And I have
supported what President Obama has done to combat climate change,
including stronger regulations on efficiency, power plants, and his
funding for energy innovation and investment overseas.

Why, then, am I being attacked by the White House science advisor as outside the scientific mainstream?

Because
I have also argued against exaggerating the relationship between
climate change and extreme weather. While politicians and environmental
advocates routinely attribute natural disasters with human-caused
climate change, the uncomfortable reality is that such attribution
remains speculative. There is not yet a scientific basis for making such
a connection. That is not an argument against taking action, but it is
an argument for accurately representing the science.

Start with
drought. According to the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, drought
has, “for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a
smaller portion of the U.S. over the last century. The main exception is
the Southwest and parts of the interior of the West, where increased
temperature has led to rising drought trends.” Globally, according to
the IPCC in its special report on extreme events, “There is medium
confidence that since the 1950s some regions of the world have
experienced a trend to more intense and longer droughts, in particular
in southern Europe and West Africa, but in some regions droughts have
become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, for example, in central
North America and northwestern Australia.”

A new review paper
just out by a team of drought experts from around the world, and who
hold a range of views on climate change and drought, explained many of
the complexities, “How is drought changing as the climate changes?
Several recent papers in the scientific literature have focused on this
question but the answer remains blurred.”

And it’s not just
drought. It is wrong to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes,
tornadoes, or floods have increased on climate timescales either in the
United States or globally. Hurricanes have not increased in the U.S. in
frequency, intensity, or damage since at least 1900. The same holds for
tropical cyclones globally since at least 1970 (at which point the data
became available to allow for a global perspective).

Floods in
the U.S. have not increased in frequency or intensity since at least
1950. Indeed, flood losses as a percentage of U.S. GDP have dropped by
about 75 percent since 1940. At the global scale there is a similar lack
of evidence for upwards trends in floods. Tornadoes have not increased
in frequency, intensity or normalized damage in the U.S. since 1950, and
there is some evidence to suggest that they have actually declined.

If
this comes as a surprise to anyone it is because of the tendency by
campaigners to cherry-pick details, obscure the larger context, and,
ironically enough, attack as "deniers" anyone who disagrees.

A
considerable body of research projects that various extremes may become
more frequent and/or intense in the future as a direct consequence of
human-caused climate changes. However, our research, and that of others,
suggests that assuming that these projections are accurate, it will be
many decades, perhaps longer, before the signal of human-caused climate
change can be detected. Extremes are by definition rare events, and for
that reason they are just not the best place to be looking for, or
expecting to see, the consequences of climate change today.

Climate
change is an important issue that will be managed for decades and
centuries to come, making accurate representation of climate science by
scientists and government officials crucial to maintaining public trust.
Exaggerations by advocates of climate action, like those of science
advisor Holdren, undermine that trust when they go beyond what the
science is telling us. Efforts to quash mainstream, legitimate voices
will further undermine that trust.

Are
environmental advocacy charities, which are eligible to receive
tax-deductible donations, violating their tax-exempt status in opposing
extraction in the Canadian oil sands, construction of the Keystone XL
pipeline, and other pet projects of the radical left?

That is the
subject of a series of audits by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) that
have been ordered under the administration of Prime Minister Stephen
Harper. The groups facing additional scrutiny include the David Suzuki
Foundation, Tides Canada, West Coast Environmental Law, the Pembina
Foundation, Environmental Defence, Equiterre, and the Ecology Action
Centre.

No more than 10 percent on politics

Under Canadian
rules, tax-deductible charities — the equivalent of 501(c)(3)s here in
the U.S. — are only allowed to spend 10 percent of their resources on
allowed non-partisan political activity.

According to the CRA,
those activities allowed under the 10 percent limit include activity
that “explicitly communicates a call to political action (that is,
encourages the public to contact an elected representative or public
official and urges them to retain, oppose, or change the law, policy, or
decision of any level of government in Canada or a foreign country);
explicitly communicates to the public that the law, policy, or decision
of any level of government in Canada or a foreign country should be
retained (if the retention of the law, policy or decision is being
reconsidered by a government), opposed, or changed; or explicitly
indicates in its materials (whether internal or external) that the
intention of the activity is to incite, or organize to put pressure on,
an elected representative or public official to retain, oppose, or
change the law, policy, or decision of any level of government in Canada
or a foreign country.”

The reasons for the limits are obvious.
Because donations to the groups are tax-deductible, they represent a net
taxpayer subsidy.

Similar rules exist in the U.S., as between
501(c)(3) charities versus 501(c)(4) organizations allowed to engage in
unlimited lobbying and issue advocacy. Both are technically tax-exempt
and not subject to any donation tax, but with a big difference.

The
501(c)(3) charity receives the tax-deductible donation subsidy, whereas
501(c)(4) does not. Read that again: (c)(4)s do not take tax-deductible
donations.

In a similar vein, like in Canada, (c)(3)s cannot
engage in electioneering — that is, advocacy for or against a candidate
for public office — whereas (c)(4)s can so long as it does not
constitute a majority of their activities.

So did the
environmental charities violate their tax-exempt and deductible status
by exceeding the 10 percent limit on allowed political activities?

$75 million spent opposing oil sands, Keystone, led to riots and attacks on police

It
may be soon to tell, as the audits are ongoing, but a December 2013
report by the Financial Post’s Vivian Krause suggest that the money
spent by the charities on anti-oil sands advocacy was and is quite
substantial: “these foundations have provided at least $75-million for
campaigns and land use planning initiatives that thwart the development
and export of Canadian oil.”

$75 million is no chump change.
Krause named names, many of whom are now being audited: “the main
sources of funding for this campaign are the Rockefeller Brothers Fund,
the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Oak Foundation, the Sea
Change Foundation, the Tides Foundation and other charitable
foundations, most of which are based in California.”

Much of the
funds have been devoted to aggressive campaigns, grassroots organizing,
and even blockading oil sands production and distribution including via
Keystone, such as a campaign called Idle No More that happens to be
funded by Tides USA.

One such oil blockade by an aboriginal First
Nation group, Elsipogtog, got out of hand and turned into a full-scale
riot, complete with gunshots and Molotov cocktail attacks that torched
at least five police vehicles.

Elsipotog
even took over a Royal Canadian Mounted Police station and replaced the
Canadian flag with a First Nation flag, reports Warrior Publications, a
pro-First Nation blog.

Is this what tax-deductible donations
both from the U.S. and Canada to campaigns like Idle No More funding?
Perhaps an audit is just what the doctor ordered.

Engaging in foreign politics can also violate U.S. 501(c)(3) tax-deductible charity status

Tides
in particular was very much concerned that the funds might at least be
used politically, issuing cover letters for its donations stating that
recipient organizations agree “not to use any portion of the granted
funds to carry on propaganda nor to attempt to influence specific
legislation either by direct or grassroots lobbying.”

However,
that might not be enough to excuse these foundations from violations of
their tax-exempt status, reports Krause: “these letters suggest to me
that [influencing legislation] this is precisely what Tides is funding.
The numbering and timing of these payments indicates that they have been
made systematically.”

Again, the CRA still has to finish its
audits, and so we are very early in this process, but the investigation
has vast implications in the U.S. where these charities are based.

Pursuant
to the U.S.-Canada Income Tax Convention ratified by the Senate in 1984
tax deductibility for exempt organizations applies across borders. So,
U.S. residents can claim a tax deduction for donations made to Canadian
charities, and vice versa.

Moreover, 501(c)(3) clearly applies to
overseas lobbying, according to an IRS publication, “Foreign activities
of domestic charities and foreign charities,” which states, “As with
inurement and private benefit, the restriction against lobbying and the
prohibition against political activity on behalf of or in opposition to a
candidate for elective public office (electioneering) exist in a
foreign context as well. For example, Rev. Rul. 73-440, 1973-2 C.B. 177,
concludes that the term ‘legislation’ includes foreign as well as
domestic laws, for purposes of the IRC 501(c)(3) lobbying restriction.”

That’s
a big deal. If Canadian authorities and courts find that U.S.
tax-deductible donor dollars were misused for politics and lobbying
either directly or at the grassroots level, that might be prima facie
evidence for pressing an investigation into groups’ tax-exempt status
here on a similar basis.

Again, the issue here is not simply one
of tax-exempt status. Donations to non-profits should be tax-exempt.
Whether they should be tax-deductible and enjoy a state subsidy is
another matter entirely.

As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “to
compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of
opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.” Tax
deductions are subsidies. The question the CRA will be answering is
whether such a state-sanctioned incentive should be enjoyed by
organizations to fundraise whose sole apparent purpose is undermining
U.S. and Canadian energy production?

Australia: No more national parks as government pledges to support loggers as the 'ultimate conservationists'

Prime
Minister Tony Abbott has said he will not support the creation of any
more national parks in a speech lauding timber workers as "the ultimate
conservationists".

Mr Abbott also told a timber industry dinner
on Tuesday night that he would create a new Forestry Advisory Council to
support the industry.

The council will be co-chaired by Rob de
Fegely, president of the Institute of Foresters Australia. Mr de Fegely
is the former Liberal Party election candidate for the seat of Eden
Monaro.

"We don't support, as a government and as a Coalition,
further lockouts of our forests," Mr Abbott said. "We have quite enough
National Parks, we have quite enough locked up forests already. In fact,
in an important respect, we have too much locked up forest."

Mr
Abbott said the federal government was pushing to delist a world
heritage listing of 74,000 hectares of forest in Tasmania. Mr Abbott
said the area – which was protected under Tasmania's forest peace deal –
was not pristine forest and was too degraded to be considered a
sanctuary.

Tasmanians go to the polls on March 15 with jobs and
the forestry industry big issues as Labor struggles to hold on to
government.

"I don't buy the Green ideology, which has done so
much damage to our country over the last couple of decades and I'm
pleased to see that there are some sensible Labor Party people who don't
buy it either," Mr Abbott said.

"When I look out tonight at an
audience of people who work with timber, who work in forests, I don't
see people who are environmental bandits, I see people who are the
ultimate conservationists.

"I salute you as people who love the
natural world, as people who love what Mother Nature gives us and who
want to husband it for the long-term best interests of humanity."

Mr
Abbott said Canberra would now be "friendly country" rather than
"hostile territory" for the forestry industry following the change of
government.

Greens leader Christine Milne said: "Who in the 21st
century would say the environment is meant for man and not just the
other way around?

"There is no economic future for Australia in
trashing our precious native forests and national parks ... In pandering
to the forestry industry the Prime Minister's statements last night
reveal he's not only anti-environment and anti-conservation, he's
anti-jobs."

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

5 March, 2014

Is global warming killing the oysters and other shellfish?

Oyster
die offs in the West coasts of the USA and Canada have been in the news
for some time now. The latest story below. The claim that
the die-offs are due to ocean acidity caused by global warming is absurd
for a number of reasons so just some comments received from Lord
Monckton:

"There are two knockdown arguments against ocean
"acidification". The first is that notwithstanding CO2 concentrations
many times higher than today's, the oceans have remained pronouncedly
alkaline for 540 million years (with the exception of a brief and
little-understood period 55 million years ago). The reason for the
pronounced alkalinity is that the oceans are buffered by the basalt rock
basins in which they lie.

The second argument is that there is
far greater natural variability in ocean pH than the bed-wetters
realize. It can vary by 1.4 pH units close to some coasts. Yet the
various marine species, including calcifying organisms, thrive. In
mid-ocean, the variance is much smaller."

Lord Monckton has also provided a more detailed coverage which I reproduce at the foot of the article below

When
Yves Perreault looks out over the pristine waters of Desolation Sound,
where his family annually harvests half a million oysters, he fears for
the future of the ocean – and the industry that supplies Canada with
half its shellfish.

Something is killing oysters and scallops in
dramatic numbers, causing suppliers to warn of shortages and producers
to worry about the future of their businesses. The cause is unknown, but
ocean acidification is the main suspect.

“It’s a remote area,
the water is clean … we haven’t had any environmental concerns, so I’m
not sure what’s going on,” said Mr. Perreault, who owns Little Wing
Oysters and is president of the BC Shellfish Grower’s Association.

Over
the past two years, Mr. Perreault’s oyster farm on B.C.’s south coast
has experienced 80 to 90 per cent mortality of young shellfish – the
normal attrition rate is 50 per cent – and last year, nearby Pendrell
Sound had a massive die-off of wild oysters.

“It was in the billions,” he said of the Pacific oysters that died only a few months after they hatched.

“It’s
hard to say without having somebody there monitoring what’s going on.
It could be food related. Maybe there were too many oysters and there
was not enough food and they just starved – or something else [is
happening] in the water like the acidity level,” he said. “To be frank,
we don’t know a lot about it and that’s what’s scary.”

Mr.
Perreault routinely monitors the ocean for food abundance, temperature
and salinity – but thinks he should test the pH level too, to keep track
of how acidic the water is.

The Vancouver Aquarium has been
doing just that – and its records show the pH level in Vancouver’s
harbour steadily declining, from 8.1 (1954-74) to a low of 7.3 by 2001.

A pH unit measures acidity with a range of 0-14. The lower the value, the more acidic the environment.

The
U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has noted a direct
correlation between rising levels of C02 in the atmosphere and levels
in the ocean. As more C02 accumulates in the Pacific, the pH decreases
and the acidic level rises.

Sophia Johannessen, a research
scientist with the federal Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, said
it is clear oceans are becoming more acidic.

Asked if ocean
acidification is to blame for oyster die-offs – and the recent collapse
of scallop stocks in a Vancouver Island operation – she said: “I’m not
sure yet. … We need to know if there is some local problem.”

Dr.
Johannessen said waters off the coast of B.C. are getting warmer and
there has been a change in the timing of zooplankton blooms, which
shellfish eat. She said a shortage of food, or increased temperatures,
could have put shellfish under stress, and then a slight change in pH
could knock them out. Chris Harley, a zoology professor at the
University of B.C., feels the same way.

“It’s an interesting
puzzle. … I’m not sure what’s killed all those scallops out in the
Strait of Georgia. … It might have been low pH, but I’m not sure we can
say that with much confidence,” he said.

But Rob Saunders, CEO of
Island Scallops, says he has tracked pH levels closely and sees a link
between increased acidity and shellfish die-offs.

“I’m convinced
the ocean is getting much more acidic, and much more acidic than anyone
anywhere believed it could happen that fast,” he said.

“It’s
definitely a sign. It’s like the canary in the coal mine,” he said.
“That is the early indicator of climate change and how it is going to
affect the availability of various products.”

The
acid-base balance of the oceans, measured in pH units (where rainwater
is strongly acid at 5.6, and 7.0 is neutral), is pronouncedly alkaline
at 7.8-8.3. The oceans have been alkaline for 540 milllion years, except
for a brief and little-understood interval 55 million years ago.
Because they are buffered by the basalt rock basins within which they
lie, they cannot become acid. Indeed, they cannot even become
significantly less alkaline.

Rainwater reacts with feldspar, the
commonest mineral, in an acid-consuming reaction to produce clays.
Alkali and alkaline earths are leached into the oceans, accounting for
their salinity. Silica is redeposited in sediments in the form of
cements in another acid-consuming reaction accelerated by temperature.

Since
pH is a logarithmic scale, there is insufficient CO2 in recoverable
fossil fuels to acidify the oceans, for most of the planet’s CO2 is
securely fixed in rocks.

In the Precambrian era, these reactions
responded rapidly to major changes in temperature (–40 to +50 Cº) and
sea level (+600 m to –640 m) over a few thousand years from snowball
Earth to very hot conditions. For instance, 750 million years ago
Neoproterozoic cap carbonates that formed in water at ~50 deg C lie
directly on glacial rocks. In the Neoproterozoic, the partial pressure
of CO2 in the atmosphere was 30%, compared with 0.04% today.

During
these times, there were rapid changes in oceanic pH and CO2 was removed
from the oceans as carbonate. From this time onward, life began to
extract substantial amounts of CO2 from the oceans. This process
continues. CO2 concentration was 15 times today’s in the
Ordovician-Silurian glaciation and five times today’s in the
Cretaceous-Jurassic glaciation. During the Permian glaciation, both
methane and CO2 concentrations were above today’s.

The process of
removing CO2 from the atmosphere via the oceans has led to CO2
sequestration by way of carbonate deposition. CO2 concentration today is
the lowest it has been for billions of years, and carbonate
sedimentation continues to remove it from the oceans, which continue to
be buffered by the basalt basins in which they lie, as shown by Walker
et al. (1981). The feldspar and silicate buffering reactions are well
understood. The oceans cannot acidify.

1:
This graph is highly topical. It is right up to date. Remote Sensing
Systems, Inc. (RSS) is one of the two satellite-based datasets (the
other is the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH). And RSS is one
of the five standard global temperature datasets, which include the two
satellite datasets and the three terrestrial datasets - Goddard
Institute for Space Studies (GISS); the Hadley Centre/CRU dataset,
version 4 (HadCRUT4); and the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). As
this month, RSS is usually the first to report, and its latest monthly
value, for February 2014, became available just hours ago. As far as I
know, no one else yet has a graph including this hot-off-the-press data
point.

2: The satellite datasets are based on measurements made
by the most accurate thermometers available - platinum resistance
thermometers, which not only measure temperature at various altitudes
above the Earth's surface via microwave sounding units but also
constantly calibrate themselves by measuring the known temperature of
the cosmic background radiation, which is 1% of the freezing point of
water, or just 2.73 degrees above absolute zero. It was by measuring
minuscule variations of the cosmic background radiation that the NASA
anisotropy probe enabled the age of the Universe to be determined: it is
13.82 billion years.

3: The graph is accurate. The data are
lifted monthly directly from the RSS website. They are read down from
the text file by a computer algorithm and plotted automatically using an
advanced routine that automatically adjusts the aspect ratio of the
data window at both axes so as to show the data at maximum size. The
latest monthly data point is visually inspected to ensure that it has
been correctly positioned. The light blue trend line plotted beneath the
dark blue spline-curve showing the actual data is calculated by the
method of least-squares linear regression, which determines the
y-intercept and slope of the line via two well-established and
functionally identical equations that are compared with one another to
ensure no discrepancy between them. Least-squares linear regression is
used by the IPCC and by most other agencies for determining global
temperature trends. Interestingly, it is recommended by Professor Phil
Jones of the University of East Anglia in one of the Climategate emails,
so no one on the true-believing side will challenge its
appropriateness. The reliability of the trend calculation by the
algorithm was verified by Dr Stephen Farish, Professor of
Epidemiological Statistics at the University of Melbourne.

4: The
graph is visually very clear. The design, the layout, the colors used,
the text font, and the line thicknesses are intended to be as clear and
comprehensible as possible. The aspect ratio of the graph is similar to
that of most modern television monitors, so that the graph can be
displayed full-screen.

5: The graph is news. Not only is it very
recent: it is also something that the mainstream news media very seldom
reveal. They tend to keep the now embarrassingly long hiatus in global
warming secret, so that this graph will astonish many viewers. I do not
know of a more recent, more reliable, more accurate, more visually
appealing graph.

All
life on our planet has changed as our planet has changed. From the
birth of our planet out of the cosmic Big Bang, to the time of the
dinosaurs, through the ice ages, life has gone extinct, been reborn, and
evolved to survive. Could the high-tech scientific world genetically
alter a future version of you to survive climate change?

Over
the past three-years, about 30 healthy genetically modified people have
been born in the United States. Genes from three or more “parents” were
used to alter these genetically modified babies, in couples that had
trouble conceiving children. Although this allowed people unable to
conceive children to have kids, it is a new science, and a controversial
one, raising numerous ethical dilemmas about weeding out the very
faults which make us human.

For years, scientists have been
researching ways to alter us through the building blocks of life. From
preventing baldness and heart disease, to changing the color of an
unborn baby’s eyes from brown to blue. So far, the genetic engineering
of people has focused on the obvious traits that we all desire. Genetic
researchers want to make us stronger, faster and more intelligent
people.

What if we put aside the ethical issues and looked at
the genetic engineering of our species not as a tool to make us better,
but a necessity for our species to survive? Although there is much
debate about who is to blame for climate change, the real issue is our
very survival as a species.

Over 280,000 people have died in the
United Kingdom so far, due to the dramatically brutal winter they are
experiencing this season. That’s pretty close to the estimated 300,000
people globally that die every year from climate change, according to a
United Nations Global Humanitarian Forum report.

But what if
instead of focusing on making us stronger, faster and smarter, genetic
researchers tried to make us more resistant to the effects of climate
change? Human beings are very fragile and weak when compared to most
other living things on our planet – if it wasn’t for our brain power,
we’d never have made it out of the stone age.

Heatstroke occurs
when the core temperature of the body exceeds 40°C (105°F), which can
happen in temperatures over 30°C (86°F). At these high temperatures, our
body’s cooling system fails, and you simply cannot cool down, leading
to nausea, seizures, disorientation, unconsciousness, coma and death.

Instead
of trying to tweak us humans to be smarter, perhaps science could
re-engineer us to resist these temperature extremes? Other animals over
hundreds of thousands of years have evolved to withstand the
elements. The polar bear has evolved over time to take the frigid
Arctic cold, able to handle temperatures from 25°C to -67°C (77°F to
-90°F). Camels can go eight days without water, and take temperatures as
high as 49°C (120°F). However, the winner has to be the tardigrade,
which can go 10 years without water and handle temperatures from 151°C
to -273°C (304°F to -459°F).

Tardigrades are teeny-tiny
waterbears that live in the farthest northern reaches of our planet,
including Iceland and northern Russia, and measure a mere 0.5mm (0.020
inches) long.

Although we can’t handle temperatures that
extreme, science may one day be able to make us more resilient to
survive climate change.

The
Obama administration is driving ahead with a dramatic reduction in
sulfur in gasoline and tailpipe emissions, declaring that cleaner air
will save thousands of lives per year at little cost to consumers.

Public
health groups and automakers cheered the new rules, finalized Monday by
the Environmental Protection Agency, with some insisting they could
prove to be President Barack Obama's signature environmental
accomplishment in his second term. The oil and gas industry, meanwhile,
panned the move, calling it gratuitous and accusing the government of
grossly underestimating the increased cost at the pump.

"The
benefits far outweigh the costs," said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy,
calling it a win for both consumers and automakers. "These standards
will reduce pollution, they'll clean the air we breathe and protect the
health of American families."

In the works for years, the rules
require refineries to cut sulfur levels in the gasoline by about
two-thirds by 2017. Less sulfur in gasoline makes it easier for a car's
pollution controls to effectively filter out emissions, resulting in
cleaner air, the EPA says. For car manufacturers, stricter limits on
tailpipe emissions will require engineering changes so that cars weed
out more pollution.

More than 2,000 premature deaths and about
50,000 cases of kids with respiratory problems will be avoided by 2030
if the rules go into effect, the EPA said.

The cost to consumers:
Less than a penny per gallon of gas, McCarthy said. The EPA also
projects the rules will raise the average cost of buying a vehicle by
$72 in 2025.

But not everyone agrees.

The American
Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil and gas industry, pointed
to studies it has commissioned estimating that the limits would add 6
cents to 9 cents a gallon to refiners' manufacturing costs while
requiring $10 billion in capital costs. American Fuel and Petrochemical
Manufacturers, a trade group, called it "the most recent example of the
agency's propensity for illogical and counterproductive rulemaking."

"This
rule is all pain and no gain," said House Energy and Commerce Committee
Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich. "This winter's cold snap underscores just
how vulnerable American families and businesses are to any increases in
energy costs, and yet the administration is moving forward to raise
prices at the pump."

Pushing back on those charges, McCarthy said
that API's study constituted an "outdated estimate" that didn't account
for changes the EPA made to the rules after receiving public comment —
such as a phasing-in that gives some refineries more flexibility to come
into compliance.

The
political wrangling over the latest round of regulations to hit the
energy industry offered a familiar reprise of a long-running debate over
Obama's attempts to use his regulatory power to clean up the nation's
sources of fuel.

With just a few years left in his term and no
appetite in Congress for major environmental legislation, Obama has
vowed to take action unilaterally to tackle climate change and other
pollution. Energy advocates have staunchly opposed Obama's proposed
emissions limits on new and existing power plants, and accuse him of
dallying on approval for the Keystone XL pipeline. The issue promises to
play a prominent role in the 2014 midterm elections, as Democrats from
energy-dependent states find themselves squeezed between economic and
environmental concerns.

Tellingly, there was little pushback from
the auto industry, with major automakers like Ford, Toyota and Honda
praising the EPA for setting one standard for emissions that will apply
nation-wide. California already uses the new sulfur standard, and while
the U.S. has tightened sulfur limits twice before, it still lags behind
many other countries.

"The EPA has effectively harmonized the
federal and state emissions requirements, and that's a big deal for us,"
said Mike Robinson, a vice president at General Motors Co. "It allows
us to engineer, build and calibrate vehicles on a national basis."

Breathing
the pollutants that come out of a car's tailpipe leads to coughing and
shortness of breath for healthy adults, but for those with underlying
conditions like asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, the
implications can be grave: asthma attacks, heart attacks, strokes and
ultimately death, said Paul Billings, the American Lung Association's
vice president.

The Obama administration already has moved to
clean up motor vehicles by adopting rules that will increase fuel
efficiency and putting in place standards to reduce the pollution from
cars and trucks blamed for global warming.

Where
to start on this one? The proliferation of wind turbines is one of the
greatest boondoggles in human history. Driven by the myth that carbon
dioxide is pollution, governments have spent billions in taxpayer money
on technology that is, like our earlier example of generating power from
lemons, more of a laboratory curiosity than a practical energy source.

These
wind turbines are a major environmental problem, encouraged by those
who somehow think an invisible trace gas is a problem. If anything
human-made has the potential to create an environmental catastrophe,
then this is it. It is now clear - as should have been obvious from the
outset - that wind turbines rob the very wind that drives them of
energy, thereby reducing the efficiency of other turbines behind them,
but more seriously affective the micro- climate of the area. If we erect
enough of these monstrosities, then there is a real chance that we will
affect bigger weather patterns.

Also from an environmental point
of view: modern wind turbines each require a massive foundation made
from hundreds, if not thousands of tons of concrete. Should the turbines
be taken down at some future date, this land will be rendered useless
for farming, recreational and other purposes, as these bases would
probably never be removed. Furthermore, they require hundreds of
kilometres of cable to join them to the electricity network. A nuclear
power station can be erected on two square kilometres of land. The
equivalent rated wind power requires two thousand square kilometres of
land, criss-crossed with electrical cables to connect the individual
turbines. Note that the rated (or "sticker") power of wind turbines is
grossly misleading. They very seldom deliver more than 15% to 20% of
their rated capacity, for obvious reasons: they only work when the wind
blows. Too low or too high wind speeds incapacitate them.

Without
massive government subsidies, there would be no wind turbines: they can
never recover the cost of manufacturing, installing and running over
their useful lifetime, originally touted as twenty years, but turning
out to be closer to ten years.

From cradle to grave, wind
turbines create more pollution, more carbon dioxide and consume more
energy than they will produce over their lifetime:

*
Wind turbines contain large quantities - several tons
each - of rare earths. These create extreme mining and production
health hazards, and a disposal problem on a par or exceeding that of
nuclear waste.

* During cold, windless
conditions, wind turbines actually draw electricity from the grid to
keep the machinery warm. So, just when power is most in demand, they
create an additional burden on conventional power stations. The blades
have to be heated in cold weather to avoid ice build-up, which renders
them useless. (Like an airplane's propeller, the ice deforms the blade
so that it produces less or no lift.) The generating equipment must also
be kept warm in windless conditions to avoid damage.

*
Some researchers now believe that some wind farms may
be net users of electricity. Power is drawn from the grid for heating,
as mentioned above, but also for other reasons: During windless
conditions, the massive blades must be rotated continuously by using the
generators as motors to prevent gravitational warping of the blades,
prop shafts and gears. During operation, power is consumed to change the
pitch and angle of incidence of the blades relative to the wind. The
entire mechanism, weighing many tons, needs to be rotated by electrical
motors from time to time to untangle the cables linking the generator to
the grid. (The cables get wound up as the head of the installation
follows the wind, rotating through 360 degrees repeatedly over a period
of time). The energy drawn from the grid for heating and other purposes
is never monitored, but is estimated to consume, at the very least, as
much as half of the already low actual output, reducing the 15 to 20%
mentioned above to as little as perhaps less than 10% of the rated
output.

There is a very simple test to determine the value of
this technology: the operators of conventional power stations will tell
you that they generate no less power and consume no less fuel than
before the windmills came along.

*
Because the rated capacity is a fictional number, never achieved in real
life by a wide margin, wind turbines cannot make up for the energy that
went into manufacturing, transport, erection and maintenance, even
assuming generous life times. They are therefore net carbon dioxide
emitters - as if that mattered - and add to overall emissions.

*
Conventional generating power equivalent to the
entire capacity of the wind infrastructure must be brought on line in
windless conditions to keep industry, businesses and our homes running.
This is a total duplication of resources, at enormous expense.

*
The backup power required for wind and solar is
sometimes called "spinning reserve". This means that these power
stations are always running, and can never be turned off, even when not
producing power: they need to respond instantly when the "renewable"
resources go offline. During these idle periods, backup stations
actually produce more pollution that when running under the design load,
a result of inefficient fuel combustion.

*
One of the most serious problems with wind turbines
is that they kill thousands of birds and bats. The tips of the blades
move at deceptively fast speeds - literally hundreds of miles per hour -
and birds simply don't detect the danger of a side-swipe from a blade
whilst flying into what appears to be empty space. Bats are killed by
the high pressure generated by the rotating blades, exploding lungs and
ear drums.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

4 March, 2014

Pest controllers have been hugely hampered by Greenie pseudo-science

Rich
Kozlovich is recommending to all his fellow workers in pest control an
article by Ron Arnold titled "Putting an end to the EPA’s ‘secret
science'" -- headlined on this blog yesterday

As we
approach NPMA Legislative Day we need to keep in mind that we are the
hunters that keep the tribe healthy.We stand on the wall telling the
world no one will harm you on our watch. Or at least that’s what we
should be doing. Because what we do is a mission, not a job.

As
we go up to the hill we will focus on positions that will benefit our
industry and the nation - especially the nation’s poor, the nation’s
infirm and the nation’s weak. In the war for public health we are the
front line. However, if we really want to help our people we can't just
focus on the symptoms of the problem we face, i.e., the regulatory
infection that plagues America.

We need to focus on foundational
things that can alter the war forever, and let’s stop deluding ourselves
into thinking this isn’t a war. We face an irrational, misanthropic and
morally defective movement that has infected the minds of the entire
regulatory state with their junk science and outrageous rhetoric.

Society
is now suffering from Green Fatigue, and the time is ripe to put a stop
to it. This article discusses a foundational problem with the EPA and
how to fix it. The green corruption of science, academia and their
scientists who produce studies that can’t be replicated (up 90%), and
green activists disguised as government bureaucrats must be dealt with
or we’re merely playing Whac-A-Mole with these people. Whac-A-Mole is
what we have been left with until now. This is a piece of federal
legislation every trade association in America should embrace – and it
should also be addressed with our nation's state legislators.

By email

Greens Exploit Widespread Science Ignorance

By Alan Caruba

I
frequently have to tell people that I am a science writer, not a
scientist. The only science course I took in college was zoology and I
passed it only because my paper on Procyon Lotor—raccoons—demonstrated
an ability to do some good research and present it cogently.

In
the decades since then I have had the opportunity to write about many
science-based topics and it became evident that a huge portion of our
society and worldwide is ignorant of how science functions and the
incredible advances for mankind that it has provided.

It is this
ignorance that is constantly exploited by the many environmental groups.
Scaring people about the climate has been their bread and butter for
decades, but a natural cooling cycle that is approaching two decades in a
few years is killing that goose that laid so many golden eggs. The same
is occurring for “renewable energy” as Europe is beginning to regret
pouring billions into wind energy while multi-million U.S. subsidies are
on the chopping block as well.

The “food police” are generating a
scare campaign about genetically modified food crops. As Dr. Jay Lehr,
the Science Director of The Heartland Institute, pointed out in a
December 2013 article, “Not one single human has been harmed by
genetically improved food.” So, naturally, some Greens are pushing to
have everything made from genetically modified organisms (GMOs)
subjected to warning labels.

Do you know who the first
environmentalists were? Farmers! It is the original “green job” because
farmers were among the original users of renewable energy—the solar
power—to grow their crops. They used wind power to draw water and grind
grain into flour. They built irrigation systems to make more efficient
use of water.

When the United States declared its independence
the nation was largely composed of farmers. Now less than two percent of
the population grows enough food to feed all of us and have plenty left
over to export. The current exception to this is California’s central
value when farmers have been denied water to save the lives of bait
fish, smelt. They’re getting no help from the federal government either.

Throughout
the last century the American Farm Bureau Federation and state farm
bureaus were leaders in conservation tillage, well-water testing, and
many other environmental improvements. As one observer noted, “Long
after the current excitement about the green economy has worn off,
American farmers and ranchers will remain green collar workers as they
have always been—efficient producers of food, fiber, and fuel and
stewards of natural resources.

In the meantime, we are subjected
to celebrities like Al Gore, Bill Maher, and Daryl Hanna, who have no
science degree. The outspoken actors, Ed Begley and Leonardo
Dicaprio only have a high school diploma and many others who opine on
environmental issues are literally high school dropouts. A long list of
news media personalities has no science degree. They include ABC’s Sam
Champion, NBC’s Matt Laurer, and CBS’s Harry Smith. CBS’s Scott Pelley
is a college dropout.

Among the scientists, many have degrees in
areas that do not reflect meteorology or climatology. They include Bill
Nye known as the “science guy” who has a degree in mechanical
engineering.

As Dr. Lehr points out, “There is little food on the
plate of humans anywhere that has not been genetically improved.” This
goes back four thousand years to the creation of wine. In 1862, an
Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel began to crossbreed simple garden peas to
improve their taste, yield and strength. Thirty years later his work on
the subject was published in the journal of the Royal Society of London,
“and the new agricultural science of hybridization was born to improve
our food.”

Writing in the February edition of Wheat Life, a
publication for Washington state farmers, John Moffatt, a wheat breeder
for Syngenta, noted that “Wheat is not only the largest crop in the
world with acreage surpassing that of even corn and soybeans, it is also
one of the most complex.” Sygenta is one of North America’s leading
wheat genetic research companies, responsible for helping farmers grow
profitable wheat with research that begins with seeds that undergo a
certification process. Their crop varieties consistently outperform
saved seed in yield, quality and test weight.

“If genetic
labeling laws are passed throughout the United States,” warns Dr. Lehr,
“it will severely set back the scientific and human health benefits of
genetic food advances. Billions of people around the world have consumed
genetically modified food since it became widespread during recent
decades. Billions more will benefit from such foods in the coming
decades.”

Meanwhile, the Green liars will continue to wage war on
humanity. From Paul Ehrlich who in 1968 forecast global famine to the
Club of Rome that in 1972 predicted exhausted resources and famine and
then had to recant the forecasts in 1976, to an endless series of
“science” lies before and since, it behooves us all to be wary and
skeptical of their claims.

We owe a debt of gratitude to those
scientists who have greatly enhanced the lives of the seven billion with
whom we share planet Earth. We owe a lot to the farmers who, thanks to
scientific breakthroughs in genetics, are feeding us.

What
is the beginning of wisdom? Well, that’s not an easy question to answer
since so many factors come into play. However, when it comes to Global
Warming and all the ancillary arguments for and against - the beginning
of wisdom is the availability and price of energy!

Last night
approximately 43 percent of First Energy’s customers in Lake County lost
their power starting for sure at 12:00 when I awoke. Of course having
lost "my" power it was clear to me - we now have a "really serious”
problem!

Actually I can’t complain because my power wasn’t out
for much more than two hours, and the temperature in the house didn’t
drop all that much, but what happens when the power goes out around
Sunday morning at 12:00 AM, and nine hours later it isn't restored?

Originally
the outages affected 43 percent of Lake County’s FirstEnergy customers.
At 9:00 AM it was closer to 24 percent and with no clear timetable for
complete restoration. (Update: According to FirstEnergy's website as of
8:16 PM over 1800 customers are still without power)

What are
people supposed to do to protect their families and property? Without
electricity there is no heat, even if we're using gas heat. It still
takes a fan to push that heat around the house, and that takes electric
power. If someone has one of those ventless gas heaters then there's
nothing to worry about, but how many have them? I don't know, but I'm
willing to bet the number is small.

The EPA now wants to restrict
the use of wood burning fireplaces and has done all in its power to
restrict drilling and mining, and is attempting to put Clean Air
Standards in place that will be doing exactly what President Obama
promised during the 2008campaign. Put coal fired power plants out of
business. Did everyone think he was just kidding around?

Ohio has
now experienced a cold period that has lasted longer and deeper than we
have experienced for decades. For or the first time in recorded history
the Great Lakes are on the verge of becoming completely ice covered.
Lake Ontario is the hold out, but the next few days have been predicted
to be ‘cold’.

Alternative energy is a failure!

The German
government - which has been the great bastion of arguments for
alternative energy and CO2 reduction to prevent Global Warming – hired a
consulting firm that has now concluded three things.

“An
independent committee of expert advisors to the German government is
recommending in a report that the country’s once highly ballyhooed EEG
renewable energy feed-in act be scrapped altogether because it is 1)
“not doing anything for the climate”, 2) “not promoting innovation”and
3) driving up the cost of energy.”

Although it is expected the
green activists will rail against this report and find all sort of
excuses to justify their anti-energy positions it is clear “the pressure
on the German government to radically scale back the EEG act is
mounting as citizens struggle with skyrocketing electricity
price.” The beginning of wisdom!

As for support of
renewable energy mandates in Ohio, an article by Travis Fisher February
12, 2014 entitled IER Expert Testifies on Ohio’s Alternative Energy
Standard states the following.

“Support for Renewable Portfolio
Standards (RPSs), such as Ohio’s Alternative Energy Standard, are based
in large measure on misperceptions. Common misperceptions regarding
these mandates include:

* RPSs will create jobs

* RPSs are needed because America is running out of coal, oil, and natural gas

* RPSs are needed because renewable energy is an infant industry in need of help

* RPSs will reduce the cost of electricity

* RPSs are an effective way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions

None
of these are true, but what is true is that RPSs raise the cost of
electricity, and the states that have RPSs tend to have the most
expensive electricity. More expensive electricity hurts people and
businesses, and it hurts the long-run competitiveness of local and state
economies because it drives energy-intensive industries out of the
state. RPSs hurt consumers by shielding producers of renewable energy
from market forces that drive reductions in cost and real increases in
efficiency through technological progress.”

Inexpensive readily
available energy sources are foundational to a modern industrial
society. The availability and price of energy is the beginning of
wisdom!

Oh, one more thing! For those who are constantly
bleating, "we need to return to nature", I would like to expand on the
progress we've made today by linking the article, "In Balance With Nature".

Wind
farm owners across Britain will earn tens of millions of pounds less
than expected because of plans by the Government to freeze the carbon
tax.

Solar farm, biomass and nuclear plant owners will also see
future earnings cut by the change, widely expected to be announced in
the Budget later this month.

The carbon tax was announced in the
2011 Budget and came into effect last year, with the aim of encouraging
new green power plants. It sets a “floor” for the price of burning
carbon each year.

The tax has the effect of pushing up the
wholesale market price for electricity — increasing profits for
renewable and nuclear generators who do not have to pay it.

Critics
say it has not attracted investment, but has handed windfall profits to
green plants built before it was introduced. Most damagingly, they say,
it makes UK manufacturers uncompetitive and pushes up consumer energy
bills.

Amid political pressure to curb rising energy costs, the
Chancellor is widely expected to freeze the tax at 2015-16 levels of
about £18 per tonne of carbon, up from about £5 now, and potentially
rule out further rises for the rest of the decade.

“Anybody who
has either developed or bought a wind farm over the past three years,
since the carbon floor was introduced, would have been working on the
basis power prices would rise alongside the carbon tax,” said John Musk,
analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “Now that that is likely to be frozen,
the return they would have hoped for will be diminished.”

He
estimates 2020 power prices would be £5 to £6 per megawatt hour lower if
the tax is frozen – shaving £300,000 off forecast annual revenues of a
typical 20MW wind farm.

With more than 7,000MW of onshore wind installed in the UK, tens of millions of pounds may be wiped off expected earnings.

Tony
Abbott's federally funded "green army" will enlist 15,000 young people
in environmental work, striking young workers from official dole queue
figures as youth unemployment soared in the year to January to 12.4 per
cent.

But young people who fill the green army's ranks will be
paid as little as half the minimum wage, earning between $608.40 and
$987.40 a fortnight.

The scheme - the cornerstone of the
government's environmental policies - is modelled on John Howard's Green
Corps, and will be an alternative to work-for-the-dole programs.

Under
the legislation introduced by Environment Minister Greg Hunt on
Wednesday, green army participants - who will be aged 17-24 - will work
up to 30 hours a week. They will be given the chance to undergo formal
training as part of their duties, but will lose their Centrelink
benefits for taking part in the scheme and fall off official joblessness
figures.

The basic rate for a single person getting Newstart
(the dole) is $501 a fortnight. But Mr Hunt said the scheme would pay
young people "significantly" more than they would receive from
Centrelink allowances, and he hoped the skills young people learnt on
the job would encourage them to move into full-time work.

"It's
giving every young person in Australia the chance to do something for
the environment, and it's bizarre that anybody would oppose, at this
time, a youth training program that helps the environment and increases,
significantly, the youths' wages."

Mr Hunt's office stressed
that the green army was "an environmental and training program, not an
employment program", although the government has repeatedly described
the army as Australia's largest ever "environmental workforce".

The
government is aiming the scheme at indigenous Australians, people with
disabilities, gap-year students, graduates and the unemployed. Enlistees
will do manual labour, including clearing local creeks and waterways,
fencing and tree planting.

Green army members will not be covered
by Commonwealth workplace laws, including the Work, Health and Safety
Act, the Fair Work Act and the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation
Act.

Despite this, Mr Hunt said all green army members would be
covered by workplace protections, including state and territory
occupational health and safety laws, insurance provided by the
government and by "service providers" paid by the government to recruit,
establish and manage green army teams, and federal work, health and
safety "compliance orders".

But ACTU president Ged Kearney said the workers should be covered by the appropriate federal workplace protections.

"This
is about taking away well-paid, well-protected jobs from people and
replacing them with low-paid, unsafe jobs," she said. "This is not about
getting people on the margins of the workforce into work, this is about
providing a low-paid workforce."

Greens MP Adam Bandt said:
"Only Tony Abbott could create a 'workforce' where the workers aren't
legally workers and have no workplace rights. If a green army supervisor
and a worker under their command get injured while wielding a pick or
building a lookout, the supervisor will have the same safety and
compensation protections as ordinary employees but the worker won't."

Mr
Reichelt mentions it obliquely but it deserves pointing out WHY good
landfill material is being dumped at sea. It is because Greenies
won't let it be dumped on land! Dredged material used to be poured
directly onto waterfront swamps and mangroves as land
reclamation. Most of the Cairns foreshore was built up that way. I
watched the dredge TSS Trinity Bay discharging into polders
there when I was a boy. But littoral swamps and mangroves
are now "wetlands" so must not be touched, even though there are untold
miles of them left

The
Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s recent decision to allow 3
million cubic metres of dredge material to be disposed of 25 kilometres
off Abbot Point in north Queensland has attracted passionate commentary
around the world.

Millions of people from Australia and overseas
have a fierce desire to protect one of the world’s most beautiful
natural wonders. As the independent body managing the Great Barrier Reef
for future generations, all of us at the Authority understand and share
that desire: it’s what makes us want to come to work every day.

But
the debate about Abbot Point has been marked by considerable
misinformation, including claims about “toxic sludge”, dumping coal on
the reef and even mining the reef. Late last week, it was confirmed that
our decision to allow the dredge disposal will be challenged in court.

So
what’s true, and what’s not? I hope with this article, I can clear up
some of those misunderstandings on behalf of the Authority, particularly
about our role, the nature and scale of the dredge disposal activity,
and its likely environmental impacts.

If you still have questions
at the end of this article, I and others from our team at the Authority
will be reading your comments below and we’ll do our best to reply to
further questions on The Conversation.

A sizeable challenge

At 344,400 square kilometres, the Marine Park is roughly the same area as Japan or Italy.

Of
this vast and richly diverse expanse, one-third is highly protected;
some places are near pristine, while others are feeling the effects of
centuries of human uses.

But rather than locking the entire area
away, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s (GBRMPA) role — as
set out under Australian law — is to protect the region’s ecosystem,
while also ensuring it remains a multiple-use marine park open to
sustainable use. This includes tourism, commercial fishing, shipping and
other operations.

While there are five major ports in the
region, to this day only 1% of the World Heritage Area is set aside for
ports. Most of the region’s 12 ports existed long before the Marine Park
was created in 1975, and nearly all fall inside the World Heritage
Area, but outside the park itself.

Responding to “toxic” claims

Among
the many claims made about the Abbot Point decision is the assertion
that the “Reef will be dredged” and that “toxic sludge” will be dumped
in marine waters.

Both of those claims are simply wrong, as are
suggestions that coal waste will be unloaded into the Reef, that this
natural wonder is about to be mined, or that Abbot Point is a new coal
port.

The reality is that disposal of dredge material of this
type in the Marine Park is not new. It has occurred off nearly all major
regional centres along the reef’s coastline before now.

It is a highly regulated activity and does not allow material to be placed on coral, seagrass or sensitive marine environments.

The
material itself in Abbot Bay is about 60% sand and 40% silt and clay,
which is similar to what you would see if you dug up the site where the
material is to be relocated.

In addition, testing by accredited laboratories shows the material is not toxic, and is therefore suitable for ocean disposal.

Limiting new port development

As
Queensland’s population has grown over the past 150 years, so too have
the size and number of ports along the Great Barrier Reef coastline.

We
recognise the potential environmental risks posed at a local level by
this growth, which is why we have strongly advocated limiting port
development to existing major ports — such as Abbot Point — as opposed
to developing new sites.

This will produce a far better outcome
than a proliferation of many, albeit smaller, ports along the coastline.
And that’s not just our view: it’s a view shared by the UNESCO World
Heritage Committee, which oversees the Great Barrier Reef’s listing as
one of Australia’s 19 World Heritage sites.

Given Abbot Point has
been a major port for the past 30 years, our approval of the dredge
disposal permit application from North Queensland Bulk Ports is entirely
consistent with this position.

The added benefit of the port is
its access to naturally deep waters, meaning it requires less capital
dredging than other ports. It also has a much lower need for maintenance
dredging.

What’s being done to protect the reef?

With
this as our backdrop, we analysed the potential impacts and risks to the
Great Barrier Reef from disposing dredge spoil off Abbot Point within
the Marine Park.

In this case, we reached the conclusion that
with 47 stringent conditions in place, it could be done in a way that
makes us confident there will be no significant impact on the reef’s
world heritage values.

These safeguards are designed specifically
to ensure potential impacts are avoided, mitigated or offset, and to
prevent harm to the environmental, cultural or heritage values
associated with the nearby Holbourne Island fringing reef, Nares Rock,
and the Catalina World War II wreck.

Our conditions are in addition to those already imposed by the federal government in prior approvals.

Again, just to clear up any confusion: the dredge material will not be “dumped on the reef”.

Instead,
we are looking at an area within the Marine Park that is about 25
kilometres east-northeast of the port at Abbot Point, and about 40
kilometres from the nearest offshore reef.

When the dredge
disposal occurs, the material will only be allowed to be placed in a
defined 4 square kilometre site free of hard corals, seagrass beds and
other sensitive habitats.

If oceanographic conditions such as
tides, winds, waves and currents are likely to produce adverse impacts,
the disposal will not be allowed to proceed.

As an added
precaution, the activity can only happen between March and June, as this
falls outside the coral spawning and seagrass growth periods. As the
sand, silt and clay itself will be dredged in stages over three years,
the annual disposal volume will be capped at 1.3 million cubic metres.

Compared
with other sites in this region, it is much less than has been done in
the past. For example, in 2006 there were 8.6 million cubic metres of
similar sediments excavated and relocated in one year at Hay Point, near
Mackay. Scientific monitoring showed no significant effects on the
ecosystem.

The dredge disposal from Abbot Point will be a highly
managed activity — and it will not, as some headlines have suggested,
mean the Great Barrier Reef will become a sludge repository or that
tonnes of mud will be dumped on coral reefs.

This is not Gladstone Harbour all over again

I have often heard during this debate that Abbot Point will become “another Gladstone”.

I
can assure you that GBRMPA understands strongly the need to learn the
lessons from past port developments, including ones like Gladstone that
fall outside of the Marine Park. This is why the recommendations from an
independent review into Gladstone Harbour have been factored into our
conditions.

Much of the criticism of the development at Gladstone
Harbour centred on monitoring and who was doing it. This is why one the
most common questions we’ve heard at GBRMPA about Abbot Point is “Who
is going to make sure this is all done properly?”

The answer is:
there will be multiple layers of independent oversight. Indeed, past
authors on The Conversation have used Townsville’s port as a good
example of how local impacts can be managed safely through transparent,
independent monitoring and reporting, and active on-site management.

This
is why we will have a full-time staff member from GBRMPA located at the
port to oversee and enforce compliance during dredge disposal
operations. This supervisor has the power to stop, suspend or modify
works to ensure conditions are met.

In addition, an independent
technical advice panel and an independent management response group will
be formed. Membership of both these bodies will need the approval of
GBRMPA.

Importantly, the management response group will include
expert scientists as well as representatives from the tourism and
fishing industries, and conservation groups. Together, GBRMPA and those
other independent scrutineers will be overseeing the disposal, and will
have the final say — not North Queensland Bulk Ports, which operates
Abbot Point, or the coal companies that use the port.

Water
quality monitoring will take place in real-time to measure factors such
as suspended solids, turbidity and light availability. This is in
addition to a long-term water quality monitoring program that will run
for five years — much longer than what is normally required.

It’s
vital that there is utmost transparency and scrutiny of what happens.
We believe that with our staff on the job, plus independent oversight
that includes the community, it will be a highly transparent process.

What are limits of the Authority’s powers?

It
is true to say that despite all these safeguards, placing dredge
material on land rather than in the Marine Park remains our preferred
choice, providing it does not mean transferring environmental impact to
sensitive wetlands connected to the reef ecosystem.

Indeed, land-based disposal is an option that must always be examined under national dredging guidelines.

But
we recognise onshore disposal is not always immediately practical. Some
of the challenges include finding suitable land, the need for dredge
settlement ponds and delivery pipelines, and potential impacts on
surrounding environments.

Ultimately, what occurs on land is
outside of GBRMPA’s jurisdiction. We do not make decisions about mines,
railways and loading facilities, and have never had the power to compel a
port authority to place dredged material onshore or to build an
extension to existing jetties.

Nor do we have the ability to stop
dredge disposal from occurring in port limits that fall inside the
World Heritage Area, but outside of the Marine Park.

Our
legislative powers simply enable us to approve or reject a permit
application for an action in the Marine Park, or to approve it with
conditions.

Based on the considerable scientific evidence before
us, we approved the application for Abbot Point with conditions, on the
basis that potential impacts from offshore disposal were manageable and
that there would be no significant or lasting impacts on the reef’s
world heritage values.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

3 March, 2014

Putting an end to the EPA’s ‘secret science’

American
taxpayers foot the bill for the Environmental Protection Agency’s
costly regulations, and they have a right to see the underlying science.
EPA bureaucrats routinely hide this public information, insolently
foreshadowing President Obama’s recently outed code of ethics, “I can do
anything I want.”

As Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) bluntly forced
the issue, “Virtually every regulation proposed by the Obama
Administration has been justified by nontransparent data and
unverifiable claims.”

“Nontransparent data and unverifiable
claims?” Translated from scientese, it’s like this: If you’re a good
scientist, you make an exact, detailed description of how you did your
study or research so anybody else can follow your description and get
the same result.

If you won’t tell anybody how you did it, your
work is not “transparent.” If you do tell and nobody else can get
the same result you got, your science is junk, or not “reproducible” –
not verifiable.

Face it, EPA science is junk and they’re hiding that fact.

Smith
is in a position to do something about Obama’s scofflaws: he’s chairman
of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, where his panel
on February 11 held a hearing on “Ensuring Open Science at EPA.”

It
was the launching pad for the Secret Science Reform Act of 2014, a bill
to bar the EPA from proposing regulations based upon science that is
not transparent or not reproducible.

That sent shockwaves through
Big Green, which has a vested interest in hiding outdated, biased,
falsified, sweetheart-reviewed, and even non-existent “science” that has
destroyed the lives of thousands in the death-grip of agenda-driven EPA
rules.

Environment Subcommittee Chairman Rep. David Schweikert
(R-AZ) gaveled the hearing to order. “For far too long,” he said, “the
EPA has approved regulations that have placed a crippling financial
burden on economic growth in this country with no public evidence to
justify their actions.”

The average American would probably ask
why the EPA is such a problem. The first witness told why: John D.
Graham, a dean at Indiana University and former administrator of the
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has years of experience
telling good science from junk.

Graham surprisingly said that EPA
science standards are “quite high” because lives depend upon proper
rules to protect us from the harmful effects of pollution while avoiding
data errors that can unjustly destroy whole sectors of America’s
economy.

The EPA isn’t living up to its standards. Why not?

The
EPA’s downfall is its poorly developed science culture, said Graham.
“In my experience working with the EPA, I have found that the political,
legal, and engineering cultures are fairly strong but the cultures of
science and economics are highly variable … First-rate scientists who
are interested in public service employment might be more inclined to
launch a career at the National Academy of Sciences” or elsewhere.

Most
damning, Graham cited a decade of National Science Foundation reports
documenting the bad quality, transparency, and reproducibility of EPA’s
scientific determinations.

Dr. Louis “Tony” Cox, chief sciences
officer at Nexthealth Technologies, needs access to sound data for his
work on health risk assessment, but he’s more than alarmed at the state
of EPA science. Cox sees “catastrophic failure in the reproducibility
and trustworthiness of scientific results.”

Even science editors
complain that many published research articles are false and even
peer-reviewed results are not reproducible.

Raymond
J. Keating, chief economist of the Small Business &
Entrepreneurship Council, who testified for the Center for Regulatory
Solutions, provided one of the hearing’s big shockers: “The annual cost
of federal regulations registered $1.75 trillion in 2008.”

A
highly credentialed witness, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health
Professor Ellen Silbergeld, picked the Secret Science Reform bill apart.
She hit two points: lack of protection for patient information privacy
in EPA health studies, and a requirement for everyone but industry to
reveal their data.

In rebuttal of both points, Graham noted that
the National Academy of Sciences is now focusing not on whether patient
data is to be shared, but how to do it while protecting privacy; and the
Secret Science Reform bill requires all EPA science, regardless of
source or funding, to have open data, including industry.

Rep.
Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) asked of the witness panel, “Do any of you
disagree with the principle that in [the] case of taxpayer-funded
research or studies, the public should have access to the underlying
data?” Silbergeld responded, “As stated in my testimony, for reasons
given, I disagree with that – respectfully.”

EPA is basing major
regulatory decisions on junk and inviting a rebellion by doing it.
Taxpayers must become America’s army of junk sniffers and ruthlessly
axe the EPA’s heart rot – respectfully, of course.

It might seem strange to say it, but I am a global warming skeptic because of Carl Sagan.

This
might seem strange because Sagan was an early promoter of the theory
that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide are going to fry the globe.
But it’s not so strange when you consider the larger message that made
Sagan famous.

As with many people my age, Sagan’s 1980 series
“Cosmos,” which aired on public television when I was eleven years old,
was my introduction to science, and it changed my life. “Cosmos” shared
the latest developments in the sciences of evolution, astronomy, and
astrophysics, but its real heart was Sagan’s overview of the history of
science and the distinctive ethos behind the scientific method.

Sagan
returned again and again to one central theme: that the first rule of
science is to follow the evidence wherever it leads, regardless of one’s
wishes or preconceptions. He spoke eloquently about the Ancient Greek
Pythagoreans and their attempt to suppress the facts about “irrational
numbers” that didn’t fit their theory. And he spoke admiringly about the
17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler, who started out pursuing a
theory in which the planets move in circular orbits reflecting the
ratios of the perfect Pythagorean solids—and ended up being driven by
the evidence to reject this theory and discover completely new laws of
planetary motion.

I didn’t end up becoming a scientist, but I
absorbed Sagan’s basic lesson and have tried my best to adhere to it in
my own field: follow the evidence wherever it leads.

But this can
be a difficult rule to follow. It is easy to spot the unexamined
assumptions of others, but harder to root out your own prejudices. A few
years ago, while watching “Cosmos” again for the first time in 25
years, I was reminded that Sagan did not always practice what he
preached, and his error sheds light on the global warming theory’s
original sin against science. It is a sin that has only gotten worse and
which explains the scandalous state of today’s debate over global
warming.

In the third episode of “Cosmos,” Sagan presents our
nearest planetary neighbors, Venus and Mars, as cautionary tales of what
happens when a potentially Earth-like planet goes wrong and become
inhospitable to life. In his telling, Venus is a warning about how a
runaway greenhouse effect can turn a planet’s surface into an acidic
furnace, while Mars is a cautionary tale about how an inadequate
greenhouse affect can leave a planet cold, dry, and barren. He proceeds
to apply these lessons to Earth, predicting two possible doomsday
scenarios: one in which deforestation causes the Earth to cool, and one
in which fossil fuels cause it to warm. (You can hear some of the audio
here, but without Sagan’s original visuals.)

Human activities brighten our landscape and our atmosphere. Might this
ultimately make an ice age here? At the same time we are releasing vast
quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect…. It may
not take much to destabilize the Earth’s climate, to convert this
heaven, our only home in the Cosmos, into a kind of hell.

This is
a bit of a cultural time capsule, preserving the precise moment at
which scientific alarmists were switching from warning about a new ice
age, in the 1970s, to warning about runaway warming.

Much of the
planetary science behind these claims, by the way, turned out to be
speculative and premature. In the 1990s, detailed satellite maps of
Venus revealed the remains of enormous volcanoes and vast rivers of
lava, implying that the planet had been entirely resurfaced by a
volcanic apocalypse as recently as 100 million years ago—which strikes
me as a much more reasonable explanation for why Venus has a surface
temperature of 900 degrees and an atmosphere full of sulfuric acid. As
for Mars, its much smaller size and lack of a planetary magnetic field,
which allows its atmosphere to be stripped off by the solar wind, are
adequate explanations for its cold, thin air and the absence of surface
water. So Venusian SUVs and overenthusiastic Martian loggers are
probably off the hook.

To his credit, Sagan admits that the science on this subject is still in its early stages—but then he makes a disastrous error.

And yet we ravage the Earth at an accelerated pace, as if it belonged
to this one generation, as if it were ours to do with as we please…. Our
generation must choose. Which do we value more: short-term profits or
the long-term habitability of our planetary home?…

The study of the global climate, the sun’s influence, the comparison of
the Earth with other worlds, these are subjects in their earliest
stages of development. They are funded poorly and grudgingly, and
meanwhile we continue to load the Earth’s atmosphere with materials
about whose long-term influence we are almost entirely ignorant.

Can
you see the error? Sagan enters this topic with a clear animus against
the profit motive and a pre-established belief that industrial
civilization is “ravaging the earth.” These are the obvious cultural
biases of a late-20th-century modern liberal. So he considers two
alternative theories—that we are destroying the planet by cooling it
down, or we are destroying the planet by heating it up—and calls for
more government funding to figure out which is correct. But his bias
prevents him from seriously considering the obvious third option: that
our effect on the Earth’s climate is negligible, any heating or cooling
is within the normal range of natural variation, and the benefits of
industrial civilization far outweigh any negative effects. But if we
don’t treat this as an option, much less as an equally likely option, no
government funding is likely to be devoted to pursuing that theory.

This
is the original sin of the global warming theory: that it was founded
in a presumption of guilt against industrial civilization. All of the
billions of dollars in government research funding and the entire
cultural establishment that has been built up around global warming were
founded on the presumption that we already knew the conclusion—we’re
“ravaging the planet”—and we’re only interested in evidence that
supports that conclusion.

That brings us to where we are today.
The establishment’s approach to the scientific debate over global
warming is to declare that no such debate exists—and to ruthlessly stamp
it out if anyone tries to start one.

That’s how we get the Los
Angeles Times loftily declaring that it won’t even publish letters to
the editor that question global warming. That’s how we get Michael
Mann’s lawsuit attempting to make it a legally punishable offense to
“question his intellect and reasoning.”

That’s how we get the
appalling petition to spike Charles Krauthammer’s Washington Post‘s
column for expressing mere agnosticism about global warming.

It’s how we get the New York Times casually suggesting that global warming “deniers” should be stabbed.

And
then there is this doozy, from my own backyard: at the University of
Virginia, Thomas Forman II declares in the student newspaper that global
warming skeptics shouldn’t even be allowed to speak on campus, because
“we should keep our debates out of our science classes.”

This, at
the university founded by Thomas Jefferson, who said, “here we are not
afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error
so long as reason is left free to combat it.” He also said, “It is error
alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by
itself.”

Forman is the president of the UVA Environmental
Sciences Organization, which “provides a link between the Environmental
Sciences Department and the students of the University,” “mainly geared
toward undergraduate majors and minors in the department.” So the guy
who believes in keeping debate out of our science classes has appointed
himself as a guide for every undergraduate who wants to enter the field
of climate science.

This puts a whole new light on the claim that
a “consensus” of climate scientists backs global warming. It’s easy to
manufacture such a consensus when you decree ahead of time that no
contrary opinion may be heard. When I saw the recent claim that 97% of
climate scientists endorse the theory of catastrophic man-made global
warming, it struck me that this is the same margin by which dictators
typically claim they have won re-election—and for the same reason. These
are both systems in which voting for the “wrong” result is not
tolerated.

Keystone Foes Form Circular Firing Squad After Running Out of Arguments

In
the New York Times today, Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, a Democrat
from Arizona who serves as co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive
Caucus, fires a warning shot above the White House’s bow. “If the
president approves the Keystone XL pipeline,” Grijalva threatens grimly,
“it would be a bad end to what could still be a very strong
environmental legacy.”

And that — “Environment Good, Keystone
Bad” — is about the sum total of his argument. Rather bizarrely, much of
the op-ed is spent relitigating the Bush years. He remembers vividly
when “George W. Bush was president and big business wrote environmental
policy.” He recalls with horror “Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy
task force.” And he harks back to the days when Barack Obama’s election
seemed to promise a “change from Mr. Bush’s way of doing business with
business.” There’s a lot of harking, actually. Insofar as the op-ed has a
clear point at all, it seems to be that under Bush our environmental
policy was disastrous, that it is a little better now, but that Obama
might ruin all that if he has the temerity to approve a pipeline.
Grijalva makes this point eight times in eleven paragraphs.

In
the remaining three, he fails to marshal a single solid argument against
Keystone XL. We are informed about “lobbying and bad science” but given
no good examples of either; we are told that “Keystone is a bad deal
for the American taxpayer on the merits” but never allowed any
indication as to why; and we are given notice that the Obama
“administration’s approach to the pipeline is a throwback to the time
when endangered species were defenseless in the face of corporate
moneymaking.” But we are never treated to anything that so much as
approaches an explanation as to why. One suspects that the author would
have enjoyed Occupy Wall Street.

The closest that Grijalva comes
to outlining what he means by the project’s being a “visible and
sometimes painful reminder of the way things were done under Mr. Bush”
is to claim that,

the contractor chosen by the State Department
to assess the pipeline’s environmental impacts violated federal
conflict-of-interest rules to get the job, and nothing has been done
about it. That company, Environmental Resources Management, did work for
TransCanada, Keystone’s parent company, in the recent past and told the
State Department the exact opposite on disclosure forms that anyone in
the world can now read for herself.

Sadly for Grijalva, though,
this is flatly untrue — as his own New York Times confirmed yesterday.
In a piece titled “No Conflict of Interest Found in Favorable Review of
Keystone Pipeline,” Coral Davenport bluntly recorded that “the inspector
general’s report concludes that the State Department’s process in
selecting ERM followed, and was at times more rigorous, than was
prescribed by agency guidance.” Further, Davenport noted, the report

"concludes
that ERM fully disclosed its prior work history — including its work
with TransCanada — and completed all previous work with TransCanada
before undertaking the Keystone review.”

Pretending as usual that
he was on the cusp of a decision, President Obama intimated last year
that he would approve Keystone only if he was convinced it wouldn’t
“significantly exacerbate” carbon emissions. He should now be satisfied.
The State Department’s Final Supplemental Environmental Impact
Statement confirms that the pipeline would not make a difference to the
overall amount of carbon being emitted:

Approval or denial of any
one crude oil transport project, including the proposed project, is
unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands
or the continued demand for heavy crude oil at refineries in the United
States based on expected oil prices, oil-sands supply costs, transport
costs, and supply-demand scenarios.

In other words, to deny the
pipeline is not to prevent its allegedly dangerous consequences. Given
that the federal government is now routinely issuing statements such as
this one, it isn’t especially surprising that the dissidents are shying
away from discussing anything of substance. The environmental movement
can continue to flail against Keystone XL if it so wishes, but
eventually it will come to recognize that that ship has sailed — and
literally. As Grist’s Lisa Hymas noticed in 2012, “Keystone pipeline
protesters are having an unintended impact.” That impact? To push
exporters to use other modes of transport while their project is
stalled. “Thanks in part to anti-pipeline activism,” Hymas noted, “oil
in North America is increasingly being shipped by train.”

And by
boats and trucks and barges, too — all of which are not only more
dangerous and less cost-effective than pipelines but serve to move
precisely the same goods to precisely the same places as Keystone would
have. Which is to say that for the anti-Keystone argument to have any
merit, it would need to be established that the oil it is intended to
carry would never have been extracted, moved, refined, or consumed. And,
as repeated analyses have demonstrated, this case can simply not be
made. Building Keystone is almost certainly not going to yield faster
oil-sands production; not building Keystone is not going to stop the
long march toward North American energy independence. What exactly are
Grijalva and his allies achieving here?

The answer, as so often,
is that they are shoring up the base — impressing what is now a
relatively minor issue into a much larger battle and hoping that the
faithful will believe that campaign gestures and political victories are
synonymous. Alas, the harsh truth is that, of late, Keystone has become
more of a political football than a pressing question of economics or
environmentalism — more important to consultants than to industrialists.
It is telling that Mr. Grijalva elected to spend the vast majority of
his brief moment in the sun taking backwards shots at an administration
that has been out of power for over five years. Instructive, too, that
having laid out his rather vapid reasons for opposing the approval, he
concluded that “more important” in this instance is that
“environmentalists have decided that enough is enough.” Where art thou,
Michael Kinsley?

Barack
Obama will be remembered for many things during his two terms in
office, but high on the list, right after lying to everyone about
everything, will be his determination to waste billions of taxpayer
dollars on every Green scheme from solar and wind energy to electric
cars, and now on "climate change."

He is calling for a
billion-dollar climate change fund in his forthcoming budget, due out
next month. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the fund "would be
spent on researching the projected effects of climate change and helping
Americans prepare for them, including with new technology and
infrastructure, according to the White House.

We don't need any
research and we don't need any new technology. The National Weather
Service has hugely expensive computers that enable it to predict what
the weather will be anywhere in the U.S. with some measure of accuracy
for up to three or four days. After that, it gets fuzzy. What will the
weather be next week? Well, maybe a bit warmer or a bit colder.

As
for the effects of weather events, we have centuries of knowledge
regarding this. We know what happens after a blizzard or a hurricane, a
drought or a flood.

When a huge storm like Sandy hit the East
Coast, we had FEMA that was supposed to come in and help the victims.
The federal government also came up with a couple of million for the
States most affected, but it is still a problem that local first
responders and utilities have to address most directly.

Obama was
out in California to show his concern for the drought-stricken farmers
and the administration is speeding delivery of $100 million of aid to
livestock farmers, $15 million for areas hit hardest, and $60 million
for California food banks to help the poor. Rep. Kevin McCarthy(R-CA)
pointed out that the drought has been "exacerbated by federal and state
regulations" including an environmental rule that placed "the well-being
of fish...ahead of the well-being" of communities.

Like Rep.
McCarthy, those on the scene point out that the drought is in part the
result of the failure to restore the water flow from California's
water-heavy north to farmers in the central and south. House Bill 3964
does that, but only if the Senate will stop holding it up. Rep. McCarthy
is joined by Rep. Devin Nunes explaining that California's system of
aqueducts and storage tanks was designed long ago to take advantage of
rain and mountain runoff from wet years and store it for use in dry
years.

As Investors.com pointed out, "Environmental special
interests managed to dismantle the system by diverting water meant for
farms to pet projects, such as saving delta smelt, a baitfish. That move
forced the flushing of three million acre-feet of water originally
slated for the Central Valley into the ocean over the past five years."

Obama
made no mention of that, but it is an example of how, in the name of
climate change billions are wasted or lost, such as when the outcry over
Spotted Owls caused a vast portion of the Northwest's timber industry
was decimated by the false claim that they were "endangered."

All
this traces back to the founding of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 by two United Nations organizations, the
World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental
Program. The IPCC was given a formal blessing by the UN General Assembly
through Resolution 43/53.

And what has the IPCC done? It has
championed the utterly false claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) is
responsible for warming the Earth and that all the industries and other
human activities that create CO2 emissions had to reduce them in order
to save the Earth. In 2007 the IPCC and Al Gore would share a Nobel
Peace Prize. As an organization and as an individual these two have
proved to be the among the greatest liars on planet Earth.

Dr.
Craig D. Idso, PhD, is the founder and chairman of the Center for the
Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. He is an advisor to The
Heartland Institute and, with Dr. Robert M. Carter and Dr. S. Fred
Singer, authored the 2011 study, "Climate Change Reconsidered", for the
entertainingly named NIPCC-Not the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. Published by The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank
that has led the effort to expose the IPCC since 2009, sponsoring eight
international conferences, the report was updated in 2013 and a new
update is due in March.

Writing in The Hill on January 30, Dr.
Idso said "the President's concerns for the planet are based upon flawed
and speculative science; and his policy prescription is a recipe for
failure" noting that "literally thousands of scientific studies have
produced findings that run counter to his view of future climate."

"As
just one example, and a damning one at that, all of the computer models
upon which his vision is based failed to predict the current plateau
(the cooling cycle) in global temperature that has continued for the
past 16 years. That the Earth has not warmed significantly during this
period, despite an 8 percent increase in atmospheric CO2, is a major
indictment of the model's credibility in predicting future climate, as
well as the President's assertion that debate on this topic is
‘settled'."

"The taxation or regulation of CO2 emissions is an
unnecessary and detrimental policy option that should be shunned," said
Dr. Idso. Unfortunately for Americans, that is precisely the policy
being driven by Obama's Environmental Protection Agency, along with the
Department of the Interior and other elements of the government.

So
the trip to California with its promise of more million spent when, in
fact, the Green policies of that State have caused the loss of the
Central lands that produce a major portion of the nation's food stocks,
reveals how utterly corrupt Obama's climate-related policies have been
since he took office in 2009.

Billions of taxpayer dollars have
been squandered by the crony capitalism that is the driving force behind
the IPCC's and U.S. demands for the reduction of CO2 emissions.

There
is climate change and it has been going on for 4.5 billion years on
planet Earth. It has everything to do with the Sun, the oceans, volcanic
activity and other natural factors. It has nothing to do with the
planet's human population.

What is profoundly disturbing is the
deliberate political agenda behind the President's lies and Secretary of
State John Kerry's irrational belief that climate change is the world's
"most fearsome" weapon of mass destruction

Australia: Brain-dead meteorologist thinks that because his city is hot it must be hot everywhere

In
parts of the USA there is record cold. See below. So which place
do we go by? It takes a Warmist to claim that local warming tells
you about global warming. Warmists mostly now don't do that
nonsense because they have found to their pain that skeptics can turn
the tables on them just about every winter. So this guy is
obviously just not bright

THE weather bureau says Perth’s
record-smashing summer was “madness” and it has used temperature and
rainfall data to lash out at climate change sceptics.

And the
state’s top meteorologists are warning West Australians they face
decades of rising temperatures – with hotter, drier and more extreme
summers.

The 2011-12 summer was Perth’s hottest on record and
this summer was the second hottest on record, tied with both the 2009-10
summer and the 2010-11 summer with an average maximum of 32C.

This summer was also the driest in five years for Perth, with just 2mm of rain, and the driest on record for Mandurah.

Perth had only three days where rain fell and not one drop fell last month – the first dry February since 2000.

It might have been the start of autumn but there was no respite yesterday, with temperatures nudging 37C in Perth.

The
weather bureau is normally conservative, but Bureau of Meteorology
climate expert Neil Bennett said the data was staring climate change
sceptics “in the face”.

“It’s climate change. It’s warming. It’s
staring you in the face,” he said. “This is crazy. This is
madness, what’s going on now.

“The climate doesn’t change like
this. This is really remarkable. The last four summers have all either
been the hottest or second hottest on rec­ord. “It’s not just
Perth – in Bunbury eight of the hottest summers have occurred since the
turn of the century.

“What we are saying is when you look and see
the trend is going up, it seems foolish to try to ignore that
trend. “This is really, really unusual. It’s a sign that the temps
across Australia are warming. There is no getting away from it.”

Mr Bennett said the climate models for “30, 40 and 50 years ahead” were also all “pointing upwards”.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

2 March, 2014

Virginia Congressman warns EPA regs could cause brownouts

“There
is the possibility of some brownouts.” That was U.S. Rep. Morgan
Griffith’s (R-Va.) take on the impact of recent Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) regulations against coal burning power plants in a brief
conversation with Americans for Limited Government on February 27.

Rep.
Griffith said in his district alone based in southwestern rural
Virginia, Appalachian Power Co. was closing two coal-burning power
plants, only one of which would be replaced by a natural gas
facility. But with a big downside — it would not produce as much
electricity as the coal plant once did.

Griffith’s story in Virginia is emblematic of what is happening nationally to America’s shrinking electric grid.

Consider
that coal as a percent of the net electricity generation has dropped
from 49 percent in 2007 to 37 percent in 2012, according to the Energy
Information Agency (EIA). For now, this is being partially offset by
increases in natural gas.

But, that actually represents a smaller
piece of a smaller pie, EIA data shows. While natural gas has increased
electricity production by 330 billion kilowatthours (kWh) to 1.132
trillion kWh a year in 2012, coal production has dropped by 498 billion
kWh to 1.5 trillion kWh.

Largely as a result of the coal plant
closures, overall electricity generation in the U.S. has dropped from
4.005 trillion kilowatthours (kWh) in 2007 to 3.89 trillion kWh in 2012
meanwhile end use has only decreased from 3.89 trillion kWh in to just
3.832 trillion kWh.

The difference between electricity generation
and end use, or implied spare capacity, has dropped from 115 billion
kWh to 58 billion kWh from 2007 to 2012.

That’s a whopping
decrease of 49.5 percent — leading to worries that very soon the ability
to keep up with demand could be compromised and brownouts could be on
the horizon.

Griffith echoed the concern, but, he said, “when
that is, we don’t know.” He noted that if future winters are as cold as
2014 has been in the continental U.S., the odds of power shortages would
go up, with more warnings from providers to curb usage.

According
to americaspower.org, an industry group, the number of coal-burning
power plants closing or converting on account of EPA regulation was 330
as of January, up from 285 in May 2013.

According to an American
Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity analysis, the hardest hit states by
EPA policy are Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, West Virginia, Virginia,
North Carolina, Kentucky, and Indiana. Nationwide, the number of actual
plant closures is five times greater than EPA predicted would occur
because of its regulations.

So, which regulations are harming this vital industry?

Perhaps
the biggest one is the EPA’s 2009 carbon endangerment finding, which
ruled that carbon dioxide, a biological gas necessary for the very
existence of life, is a “harmful pollutant” under the terms of the Clean
Air Act.

But then there’s also the regional haze rule, carbon
restrictions on new and existing power plants, and the “National
Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants” that restricts mercury
emissions from plants.

Sue-and-settle arrangements the agency
enters with organizations are a problem, too. This is where a group sues
demanding that the EPA enforce the law in a new, expanded way and the
agency enters into a consent decree with the party, which is signed by a
judge. This leaves the agency with new powers under the Clean Air and
Water Acts.

No agency possesses the power to make law, and yet
that is precisely what the EPA has done by placing itself above Congress
on all matters relating to energy production and consumption.

And
until Congress does something about it by defunding the agency’s
implementation of these regulations, or federal courts rein in this
rogue entity, it appears all but certain that there will be brownouts.

We need technologies that work in the US and in Pakistan, say Roger Pielke and Daniel Sarewitz

Having
failed to stem carbon emissions in rich countries or in rapidly
industrialising ones, policy makers have focused their attention on the
only remaining target: poor countries that do not emit much carbon to
begin with.

Legislation to cap US carbon emissions was defeated
in Congress in 2009. But that did not prevent the Obama administration
from imposing a cap on emissions from energy projects of the Overseas
Private Investment Corporation, a US federal agency that finances
international development. Other institutions of the rich world that
have decided to limit support for fossil fuel energy projects include
the World Bank and the European Investment Bank.

Such decisions
have painful consequences. A recent report from the non-profit Center
for Global Development estimates that $10bn invested in renewable energy
projects in sub-Saharan Africa could provide electricity for 30m
people. If the same amount of money went into gas-fired generation, it
would supply about 90m people – three times as many.

In Nigeria,
the UN Development Programme is spending $10m to help “improve the
energy efficiency of a series of end-use equipment ... in residential
and public buildings”. As a way of lifting people out of poverty, this
is fanciful at best. Nigeria is the world’s sixth-largest oil exporter,
with vast reserves of natural gas as well. Yet 80m of its people lack
access to electricity. Nigerians do not simply need their equipment to
be more efficient; they need a copious supply of energy derived from
plentiful local sources.

Or consider Pakistan, where energy
shortages in a rapidly growing nation of 180m have led to civil unrest –
as well as rampant destruction of forests, mostly to provide firewood
for cooking and heating. Western development agencies have refused to
finance a project to use Pakistan’s Thar coal deposits for low-carbon
natural gas production and electricity generation because of concerns
over carbon emissions. Half a world away, Germany is building 10 new
coal plants over the next two years.

These examples emerge from a
larger, uglier background: a widely shared assumption that poor nations
need not aspire to the sort of energy consumption seen in North
America, western Europe and other wealthy regions. For example, the
World Bank’s action plan for energy access fails to foresee that
residents of a poor nation such as Chad might eventually aspire to use
more than, say, a 10th of the energy consumption enjoyed by a
middle-income nation such as Bulgaria.

Aspirations are critical
here. If two lightbulbs, a fan and a radio are the goal – a standard
measure of “energy access” used by the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All
initiative – then a couple of solar panels or windmills might do the
job. But if the rapidly urbanising poor are to have any chance of
prosperity, they need access to energy on the same scale as all modern
economies.

Climate activists warn that the inhabitants of poor
countries are especially vulnerable to the future climate changes that
our greenhouse gas emissions will cause. Why then, do they
simultaneously promote the green imperialism that helps lock in the
poverty that makes these countries so vulnerable?

If, in coming
decades, Africa was to achieve rapid economic growth of the kind that
China has experienced, it would lift hundreds of millions of people out
of poverty. But as the rich world can attest, economic growth both
requires energy consumption and leads to more of it – most of which must
be provided by fossil fuels.

Last year China’s 1.4bn people
were responsible for more than 10bn tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions,
while the 1bn people on the entire African continent emitted just a 10th
of that amount. Africa’s population could exceed China’s within a
decade; it could be double China’s by the middle of the century. The
prospects of these billions of people depend in large part on growth in
their energy production and consumption.

Nations such as China
and Brazil have big aspirations. They have not accepted a future without
fossil fuels. If we are to reduce emissions without condemning vast
swaths of humanity to unending poverty, we will have to develop
inexpensive, low-carbon energy technologies that are as appropriate for
the US and Bulgaria as they are for Nigeria and Pakistan. Even this will
involve sacrifice; it will require an investment of significant
resources over many decades.

Until these technologies are brought
to fruition, we must work with what we have. We in the rich world have
chosen economic growth over emissions reductions. It is cruelly
hypocritical of us to prevent poor countries from growing, too. If we
are forced to adapt to life on a planet with a less hospitable climate,
the poor should at least confront the challenge with the same advantages
that are enjoyed by the rich.

Obama’s Interior Secretary to Dying Eskimos: “I’ve Listened to Your Stories, Now I Have to Listen to the Animals.”

Obama with the old bag concerned

In
one of Alaska’s most remote outposts, where a thousand hardy souls make
their homes, the Obama administration has put the fate of birds and
bears above the lives of people, blocking construction of an 11-mile
gravel trail connecting a tiny fishing hamlet to a life-saving airport.

King
Cove has a clinic, but no hospital or doctor. Residents must fly 600
miles to Anchorage, via Cold Bay’s World War II airstrip, for most
medical procedures including serious trauma cases and childbirth.
Frequent gale-force winds and thick fog often delay or jeopardize
medevac flights.

According to local Aleutian elders, 19 people
have died since 1980 as a result of the impossible-to-navigate weather
conditions during emergency evacuations.

U.S. Interior Secretary
Sally Jewell on Monday rejected a proposal for a one-lane gravel road
linking the isolated community of King Cove with the all-weather airport
in Cold Bay some 22 miles away.

During an August visit to
Alaska, Jewell was told that building a road that connects King Cove and
Cold Bay was vital. But in December, Jewell rejected the road saying it
would jeopardize waterfowl in the refuge.

“She stood up in the
gymnasium and told those kids, ‘I’ve listened to your stories, now I
have to listen to the animals,” Democratic state Rep. Bob Herron told a
local television station. “You could have heard a pin drop in that
gymnasium.”

Della Trumble, spokesperson for the Agdaagux Tribal
Council and King Cove Corp., called Jewell’s decision “a slap in the
face” just in time for the holiday week.

The Interior secretary
called her personally, Trumble said, but she was at the store and only
got the message when she returned to the office.

“She says that
she knows that I’m not going to like her decision and wishes me and my
family a very merry Christmas,” she said. “I’ve not returned the call
because I don’t trust myself.”

Etta Kuzakin, a 36-year-old King
Cove resident who serves as Agdaagux tribal president, needed an
emergency Caesarean section in March after going into early labor with
her now 9-month-old daughter, Sunnie Rae. Giving birth in King Cove
could have killed her and her baby, she said.

But with medevac
flights grounded by ugly weather, Kuzakin waited in labor for 10 hours
until the U.S. Coast Guard helicopter flew her out in the afternoon.

“If
there had been a road, it would be two hours out,” she said. “I sat
there in labor not knowing if I was going to die or my kid was going to
die. Pretty traumatic.”

Back in 1997, Bill Clinton threatened to veto the King Cove Safety Act. Presumably Bill was also listening to the animals.

This
is what environmentalists are like. They are constitutionally incapable
of empathy for human beings. Instead they deploy a self-righteousness
that masks an inner callousness and cruelty.

'Smart growth" projects across the country aim to jam people into high-density housing near mass transit systems.

Proponents
think this will make people abandon their automobiles, reducing
greenhouse gas emissions. But new research shows "stack-and-pack"
housing is an ineffective way to reduce carbon dioxide levels.

Researchers
at the University of California Energy and Resources Group in Berkeley
used Census, weather, economic and transportation data — 37 variables in
total — to estimate greenhouse gas emissions from the energy,
transportation, food, goods and services consumed by U.S. households.

They
calculated "household carbon footprints" for more than 31,000 U.S. ZIP
codes (of approximately 43,000 total) in all 50 states and found that a
"10-fold increase in population density in central cities yields only a
25% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions."

In other words, the
number of people living in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia and New York would have to increase 10
times — from 1.5 million in Philadelphia, for example, to 15 million —
to yield a 25% reduction in CO2.

Stack-and-pack
living is a blueprint for misery in urban America. Few people would
want to live in such conditions. Yet this is exactly the vision that
smart-growth advocates and their political allies are pushing.

For
example, the regional smart-growth plan for the San Francisco Bay Area,
approved last summer, calls for jamming an additional 2 million people
into just 5% of the Bay Area's land over the next 27 years.

Similar
plans exist, or are being discussed, in metro Chicago, El Paso,
Minneapolis-St. Paul and a seven-county area of South Florida —
including Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties — to name a few
locations.

These regional government master plans effectively
eliminate local control of communities. They also run into the Law of
Unintended Consequences.

As politicians force urban centers to
embrace more high-density housing, people who still want the American
dream of a single-family home with a yard must move to the suburbs and
commute farther.

As Jones, the UC Berkeley researcher, explained:
"High-carbon suburbanization results as an unintended side effect."
Carbon emissions ripple out as dense suburbs emerge and, in turn, these
suburbs spawn their own suburbs even farther out. The overall effect in
large metropolitan areas is a net increase in total household carbon
emissions.

And here lies the folly of government master plans to
control growth. People are not chess pieces to be moved about at the
will of politicians and bureaucrats. People have dreams and aspirations
for themselves and their families.

Those dreams stand independent
of planners' preferences, and are often at odds with them. People still
want single-family homes and are willing to drive long distances, if
they must, to have them.

It would come as no surprise if
smart-growth promoters next try to ban gasoline-powered automobiles or
tax commutes beyond a certain radius. The end result of smart growth is
greater political control over our daily lives.

The Berkeley
study unintentionally offers strong support for the idea that local
housing, transportation and land-use decisions should be made locally —
not by regional governments, not in state capitals and certainly not in
Washington.

CO2 emissions would fall in metro areas if people
could get the housing they want close to where they work, not miles and
miles away.

If governments ended their war on home construction,
builders could buy the land they need to construct the housing that
local people want, not housing that politicians and smart-growth
activists want. That would increase the stock of affordable housing and
help the environment too.

The
Spanish government said it plans to end all price subsidies for wind
capacity online before end-2004, while slashing remuneration for younger
capacity.

The full 1,700-page regulation, a summary of its
long-awaited renewables regulation, was sent to regulator CNMC for a
20-day consultation period. It has not yet been made public. wind
turbine burnsThe summary alone, nonetheless, discloses an act of
institutional "retroactive looting", Spanish wind association AEE told
Windpower Monthly.

Investors behind all of Spain's 22.6GW of
online wind capacity were drawn by the state's promise of maintaining
feed-in tariffs for 20 years. Just over 8.4GW was online by
end-2004. Under the new regulation, all that capacity will now only
receive the wholesale power market price.

The proposed
regulation, to take immediate effect, establishes 1,600 parameters for
calculating renewables remuneration. It fleshes out a June 2013 law
replacing all renewables feed-in tariffs with a remuneration based,
instead, on a "reasonable profit" of 7.5% across plant lifecycle.

"It is the most harmful policy dictated against wind in any country," said the AEE, which is calling for EU intervention.

The
Queensland Government is looking to restrict who can object to mining
applications, in a bid to crack down on what it calls philosophical
opposition to projects.

Currently any group or person can object to applications, potentially sending the decision to the Land Court.

Deputy
Premier Jeff Seeney said it was "frustrating" for the Government.
"It's obvious that the current process allows individuals or groups who
are fundamentally opposed to the coal industry - for whatever reason -
to use the objection process to frustrate and delay those projects," he
said.

"The people of Queensland have elected us as a Government
based on developing our coal industry to supply the world markets and
our processes need to allow us to do that."

In the next few weeks, the State Government will release a discussion paper looking at who can object to applications.

"What
we're looking at is a process that will have an assessment process that
is relative to the risk the project poses," Mr Seeney said.

"So
for the really big projects I think it should be open to almost anyone,
but for the smaller projects and for the lesser approvals ... there is a
much different requirement."

Mr Seeney declined to spell out the definition of a big project.

The
changes in the latest paper are broadly similar a 2013 discussion paper
called Reducing Red Tape for Small Scale Alluvial Mining.

It suggests restricting objections to mining leases to "affected landholders" and local governments.

EDO chief solicitor voices reservations about changes

Environmental
Defenders Office Queensland principal solicitor Jo Bragg says she has
grave concerns about the impact this could have. "It's hard to see
what the Government means, but it appears to mean just a person where
the mine is on their land," she said.

"But the community ... concerned about endangered species, groundwater - they should also be able to object as they can now."

As the discussion paper has not been publicly released, the Deputy Premier also declined to define an affected landholder.

In
the Darling Downs community of Acland, some locals are concerned about
how any potential changes could affect them. The New Acland Coal
Mine wants to expand to export up to 7.4 million tonnes of coal a year.

Veterinarian
and farmer Nicki Laws is a member of the Oakey Coal Action Alliance and
lives 30 kilometres away from the mine itself.

She says she
wants to make sure her voice is heard. "These ecosystems underpin
us all, they underpin our communities, our living, our health, our
prosperity as a district - so if we're threatening it, anyone should be
allowed to comment on that," she said.

Mr Seeney said he would encourage everyone to participate in the discussion once the discussion paper is released.

"This
proposal is about reviewing the assessment process, understanding the
Government has a mandate from the people of Queensland and ensuring that
the process allows us to fulfil that mandate," Mr Seeney said.

He
did not provide specific examples of philosophical or vexatious
objections. "This review is not about any particular
circumstance," he said.

"It's part of a broader commitment that
we've given to the people of Queensland to review the assessment
processes to ensure the projects the Queensland economy needs can
proceed and respond in a responsible and appropriate way."

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That
the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however
disputed.

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any
given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about
100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much
seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in
average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless
altogether. Warmism is a money-grubbing racket, not science.

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by
experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you
believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians,
nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers".
It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an"
could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed
holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household
items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays",
"might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global
cooling

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has
been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd;
indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a
widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to
acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of
duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is
nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run
the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics
are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of
the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development
of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes
involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer
driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on
hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off
abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the
real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my
research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much
writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in
detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that
field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because
no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped
that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I
have shifted my attention to health related science and climate
related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic.
Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC
blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental
research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers
published in both fields during my social science research career

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is
reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global
warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It
seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in
global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics
or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future.
Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities
in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism
is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known
regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are
on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the
science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let
alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world.
Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a
scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to
be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be
none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions.
Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would
disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific
statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a
psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to
be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous
pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation
of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that
suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old
guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be
unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with
tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can
afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society
today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were.
But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that
seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count
(we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader
base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an
enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the
weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate
50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met
Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The
Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because
they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their
global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here)
that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative
donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they
agree with

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the
Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a
pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we
worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that
clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down
when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years
poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that
might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid
their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback
that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2
and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence
gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years
show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2
will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to
bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to
increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the
plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its
carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It
admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast
filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of
the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather
improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the
universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for
making up such an implausible tale.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A "HEAT TRAPPING GAS". A gas can become
warmer by contact with something warmer or by infrared radiation
shining on it or by adiabatic (pressure) effects but it cannot trap
anything. Air is a gas. Try trapping something with it!

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all
logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level
rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the
average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting
point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the
Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which
NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees.
So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And
the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not
raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of
Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the
water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated
it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with
that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The
whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening
of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen:
"We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of
decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very
partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw
data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that
it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones'
Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate
data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make
the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something
wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given
conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive
such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real
environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more
motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity
that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence
showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of
the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty
and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of
the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to
admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the
date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been
clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that
saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of
society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that
fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called
phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming
is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the
hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so
Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people
want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing
all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the
real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better
than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all
Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a
Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global
Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie
panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a
new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the
threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit
the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The
real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong.
The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly
"Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first
performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop.
Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first
performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience
walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate
are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913,
we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that
supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note
also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably
well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming
denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it.
That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses
believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say
that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed --
and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when
people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as
too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy.
Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common
hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact
that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few
additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a
hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we
breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical
to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad
enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180)
must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not
to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the
ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research
grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of
money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some
belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of
"The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked
event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist
instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without
material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such
people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example.
Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that
instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious
committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them
to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them
to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and
folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES
beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any
known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough
developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil
fuel theory

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this,
that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light;
preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts
shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that
his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes
to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the
earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise
reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so
small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally
without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a
time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures
tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th
century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because
they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely.
But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern
hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the
world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is
claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since
seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to
even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility.
Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the
atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the
oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No
comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base
balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational
basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units
has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air
movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an
unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate
experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables
over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years
hence. Give us all a break!

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This
crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I
am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils,
namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by
an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In
such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and
are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts
production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to
be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to
every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper
was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film.
It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account
fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is
nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a
Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven
climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of
the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the
paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in
recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie
mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that
reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented
July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even
have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact
that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving
into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got
the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:"The
modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by
Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the
number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an
acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient
between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was
doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green,
Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished
the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in
Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in
1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and
economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The
correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."
So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the
Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature
rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if
measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been
considered.

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar
cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal
electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic
to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the
article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename
the following: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20121106-1520/jonjayray.comuv.com/